Puzzle number one: In the front section of this morning’s New York Times, Gina Kolata has a follow-up piece (yes, another one) on the mammography question. The first two-thirds of the 1,400-word story detail how the panel that made the recommendations enlisted Dr. Heidi D. Nelson of the Oregon Health and Sciences University to review the existing literature on breast cancer screening.

Here’s the puzzle: Very little in this section is attributed. Nelson isn’t quoted, nor is anyone else from Oregon. And there is no indication where or how Kolata got this information.

Yet, oddly, the story is accompanied by a picture of Nelson (above). Here’s my guess: Nelson agreed to tell Kolata the story only on condition she not be quoted. Fair enough, if that’s what happened. Whatever the story, Kolata should have explained where she got the information. That’s standard practice in our business, isn’t it?

Puzzle number two: It’s a variation of something recently discussed on the National Association of Science Writers’ listserv. Can one be a science writer without having some expertise in science? Or, in the case of the NASW discussion, calculus?

I’m late catching up with Steven Pinker’s review of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book in the Nov. 15 New York Times Sunday Book Review. I’m not interested here in the content of the review, but rather this assertion of Pinker’s: “…when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse, or flat wrong.”

I’ve made a career out of interviewing experts, as many of us have. Where does that leave us? Banal, obtuse, or flat wrong?

- Paul Raeburn

A most unusual blog is to be found at the ScienceFriday site (that’s the production company that provides, mainly, NPR’s radio show with Ira Flatow). The arm in question here is called SciArts. It jitters around at the nexus, such as it is, between scientific research and artists’ visions.

The Tracker wants to be sure that everybody with wit and imagination sees one recent entry and the video to which it links. The post is by science and technology journalist Karen A. Frenkel. She calls it  The Attraction of Magnetic Movie. A few years ago, it appears, the Space Sciences Laboratory that the Univ. of California runs in the hills above Berkeley, mainly on NASA contract, invited a team of video artists to hang around for five months. Among the results was a four minute bit on magnetic fields in space… sort of. Except, you know artists, you can’t quite trust them. This lot decided not merely to interview a few researchers but to cook up a totally whacked, utterly delightful, nonsensical yet insightful way to show solar and other fields dancing around. They don’t explain why they portrayed them as they did. It makes no linear-logical sense. Some people may take the video too seriously. So, try to take it just seriously enough.

Read Frenkel’s post to get to the video link – it’s right in the first graf. It just won a big prize, which Frenkel describes. Others of her entries at the site are gathered in one place here.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Ángela Posada-Swafford is a science journalist who will spend 35 days on the Antarctic Peninsula blogging from Palmer Station, podcasting, recording videos and writing stories in a special site created by Muy Interesante, the most-read Spanish language magazine on science. The tracker has talked to Ángela, and a she has shared with us her motivations, science topics she is going to tackle, and multimedia platforms she will use. We’ll be following her adventure.

“El 20 de noviembre, la corresponsal en EE.UU. de MUY Interesante, Ángela Posada-Swafford, emprenderá una travesía de 35 días a la Península Antártica, acompañando a un grupo de científicos que intentan desentrañar los misterios de las interacciones entre el mar, el hielo y la atmósfera. Te invitamos a seguir las aventuras de Ángela día a día desde nuestra web”

Así presentaba la revista MUY Interesante el amplio despliegue de medios que ha preparado para cubrir el viaje de la apasionada y aventurera periodista científica Ángela Posada-Swafford, En el Tracker rastremos con atención su trabajo, pero antes ya nos ha explicado con contagiosa ilusión qué ciencia va a cubrir, cómo utilizará el potencial multimedia, quien financia este esfuerzo en divulgar la investigación, y cuáles son sus motivaciones para realizar esta tan linda empresa.

Knight Tracker: Ángela, ¿qué vas a hacer?

Ángela Posada – Swafford: Voy a participar durante 35 días en las investigaciones de campo del verano antártico en la Estación Palmer (Península Antártica). Palmer fue designado como un LTER Site (Long Term Ecological Research Study) de la National Science Foundation (NSF) de EEUU. Es decir, un lugar donde se llevan décadas haciendo observaciones rigurosas sobre los efectos del cambio climático en todos los aspectos ecológicos de la triple frontera entre el hielo, el mar y la atmósfera. Existen 26 sitios LTER en EE.UU. Puerto Rico, Tahiti y la Antártida. Estaré posteando a diario video, audio, fotos y textos en MUY Interesante, y responderé las preguntas que los lectores me realicen.

También haré videoconferencias en vivo con museos de ciencia e instituciones educativas de 3 países Latinoamericanos: Colombia, Chile y México o Uruguay.

KT: ¿Quién financia tu viaje?

APS: Gané una beca que el Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) y la NSF concedieron a periodistas con motivo del año Internacional de los Polos, y que se amplió a tres años.

Yo solicité el año pasado y no lo conseguí, así que volví a intentarlo, esta vez con éxito. El MBL tiene unas oportunidades maravillosas para periodistas de ciencia, que incluyen cursos prácticos en su hermoso campus de Cape Cod, y visitas  a Toolik Lake, en Alaska, que es otro LTER Site, en el cual estuve también.

KT: ¿Cuál es tu motivación profesional para esta aventura?

APS: Estuve en el Polo Sur Geográfico y en la estación McMurdo en el 2006, gracias a otro fellowship de la NSF para periodistas, y sabía que me faltaba aun “la otra mitad” del continente antártico. Siempre he sentido fascinación por la Antártica, y es algo que quise compartir con los niños a través de mi novela “90 Grados de Latitud Sur”, que es parte de la colección Aventureros de la ciencia.  Pero además me parece que la Antártica es el epicentro de muchos factores claves para la ciencia, y que cobrará todavía más interés en el futuro, con los impresionantes descubrimientos que nos están llegando sobre su fascinante geología.  Cuando pienso en mis clases de geografía en la escuela me siento “robada”, pues nunca me hablaron del continente blanco, que tiene el tamaño de todo EEUU y México combinados. Mi motivación es seguir recorriendo el velo antártico, utilizando cobertura en varias plataformas para poder llegar públicos diversos.

KT: Además del Cambio Climático ¿Qué otros temas vas a cubrir?

APS: Palmer es un lugar pequeño, donde en el verano no hay más de 40 personas trabajando (a diferencia de McMurdo, donde hay hasta 1,000). La idea es acompañar diariamente a diferentes investigadores en sus salidas de campo. Estas incluyen estudios de glaciología, pingüinos, microbios, zonas de anidación de aves marinas, ecosistemas pelágicos. Será una experiencia distinta del frío y la sequedad extremos del Polo Sur, ya que estaré conduciendo mi propio zodiac por entre los glaciares y las pingüineras (¡tendremos que pasar un curso!) mucho menos frías, pero mucho más húmedas.

KT: ¿Cómo vas a utilizar el formato multimedia?

APS: Esto es algo emocionante para mí porque la NSF me concedió el permiso de hacer una serie de videoconferencias en vivo desde Palmer enlazando a varios museos e instituciones de ciencias en Latinoamérica. Sólo una vez en toda su historia se permitió usar toda la banda ancha de Palmer (dejando a los científicos momentáneamente sin acceso a Internet); y eso fue cuando Oprah Winfrey estuvo allí. NSF está tan interesada en la divulgación de esta ciencia antártica a la comunidad latinoamericana, que ha permitido dos sesiones de al menos una hora con niños de todos esos países. La logística es grande: Los técnicos de Palmer llevan días trabajando en un sistema que nos permita este enlace múltiple, cuya señal debe viajar miles de millas por satélite. Pero el entusiasmo que tienen todos me llena de alegría. Y los medios de comunicación en Latinoamérica ya comienzan a anunciar el asunto.

Es posible que también colabore con Science online, pero la revista Muy Interesante ha diseñado especialmente para esta ocasión una página con contenidos interactivos donde se podrán seguir mis huellas desde que me embarque en el buque. También hay un rincón donde los lectores podrán hacerme preguntas.

Los lectores… y todos aquellos que queramos saber más sobre la aventura de la encantadora Ángela y su cobertura periodística. Iremos actualizando…

- Pere Estupinyà

What a wonderful term is “mammoth steppe,” with its evocation of a vanished, northern prairie with vegetation and immense mammals unlike anything today – yet spread widely across the northern hemisphere just a  geological blink ago. The terminology has a long history, but is given more meaning, and melancholy, by news this week. I missed tracking this in time for Friday’s email newsletter, but found the research too interesting to just leave unexamined all weekend.

Plenty of news outlets perked up to a paper in Science entitled “Pleistocene Megafaunal Collapse, Novel Plant Communities, and Enhanced Fire Regimes in North America.” Its authors, from U. of Wisconsin-Madison mainly, plus colleagues at U. of Wyoming and Fordham, stitch up a detailed tableau of how the mammoths, mastadons, giant sloths, camels, and other great beasts died away – and all inferred from dung fungus and other biological proxies for giant animals and their accompanying plants that were taken from a lake in Indiana and a few places in New York. The analysis concludes that the creatures took their main dive between 14,800 and 13,700 years ago. At the same time vast stretches of grass and brush land converted itself to forest – perhaps because big herbivores weren’t eating the trees anymore.

The point: this millennial-scale die off occurred considerably before when another widely-publicized hypothesis for the extinctions cause, the impact of a small comet somewhere over or near what is now Canada, is supposed to have occurred. That’s a pretty good news hook, even though the impact explanation for the end of mammoths has never quite gone mainstream in the academic community. A better hook, one used by more reporters, is simply that research is startng to pry apart the mystery of the end of the hefty Pleistocene bestiary. No proof of what happened is at hand. But the timing is clearer.

At the Christian Science Monitor Peter N. Spotts zips economically through such points quickly and selects for his first quote one, from an outside authority, who calls the work “elegant” (even with dung spores as exhibit A, it’s elegant!). And he describes nicely the reaction of the research team – which went into it with a limited agenda and would up glimpsing a time when “everything is happening all at once.” Plants and animal in tumult, ice sheets retreating, people showing up, and so on. Climate change, he reports, looks like the big actor (not comets, not spear-chunking hunters. They both would have come after the extinction was basically done).

The LA Times’s John Johnson Jr. similarly wraps it up after declaring that “a team of American researchers may be closing in on the answer, hidden in the thousands-year-old much of an Indiana Lake.

An unusual twist on the news is at New Scientist. There Jeff Hecht combines the report in Science with some digging into papers and sessions coming up in San Francisco next month at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The AGU is where the comet hypothesis got its first major airing a few years ago. And backers of the impact explanation plan a new round of papers – and expect to encounter plenty of skeptics, Now, reports Hecht, and new paper this week should raise doubters’ eyebrows even more.

Other stories:

• Wired Science – Betsy Mason: Dung Fungus Provides New Evidence in Mammoth Extinction ;
• NYTimes – Nicholas Wade : New Data Shed Light on Large-Animal Extinction ; His lede is different – it stresses that whenever modern peoples came across a landscape of big animals that evolved without people around, the animals tended to get killed off. His implication: N. America, too. But the piece than sketches out how and why, in this case, just maybe H. sapiens is off the hook.
• BBC – Victoria Gill: Dung helps reveal why mammoths died out ;
• Guardian (UK) Ian Sample: Sophisticated hunters not to blame for driving mammoths to extinction ;
• Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel – Mark Johnson: UW scientists creep closer to solving mystery of mammoths’ extinction ;
• NPR – Richard Harris : Fungus Provides Clues to North American Extinctions ; He calls the researchers’ method clever and nifty and adds in some of the other species that went out with the mammoths – beavers big as bears, horses, the American lion, dire wold, and the short-faced bear. One might also add the steppe bison, bigger than our buffalo and with marvelous long horns.
• LiveScience – Jeanna Bryner: Extinction of giant mammals altered landscape ; She muses that the result “could paint a picture of what’s to come if today’s giant plant eaters, such as elephants, disappear.”

Grist for the Mill: U. Wisconsin-Madison Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

My first question was about the timing. Why was the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) releasing its new guidelines on pap smears for cervical cancer this week, when politicians and the public were still seething over new recommendations for breast cancer screening?

Denise Grady, in the lead story in The New York Times, had the best answer I saw. Dr. Cheryl B. Iglesia, the chair of the ACOG panel that developed the pap smear guidelines, “called the timing crazy, uncanny, and ‘an unfortunate perfect storm,’” Grady wrote.

The recommendations are scheduled to be published in the December issue of Obstetrics &  Gynecology, so ACOG could not delay their release. The timing, Iglesia told Grady, was incidental, and the work on the guidelines had been under way long before the debate over health reform.

Part of what made it a perfect storm was that both sets of recommendations reduced the amount of screening recommended. That led to Republican charges that the new guidelines were an example of the rationing of care to be expected under the Obama health plan, which was not true. But the guidelines did play into concern among the public about possible health-care cutbacks under the bills being considered by Congress.

Presumably that is why Grady’s story led the paper, beating out a story on the first complete examination of Pentagon air defense since 9/11.

Really? Delaying pap smears by a few years is more significant than a major review of U.S. defense policy? Of course not. It was a silly call by the Times–an indication that Times editors might have escaped swine flu infections but are clearly infected with Washington health-reform hysteria.

Grady also beat out the announcement that Oprah Winfrey’s show is ending some time in the next decade. Now there’s where we could have a healthy debate. Too bad Oprah’s announcement isn’t a science story; I would have had a lot to say about that coverage.

In her On Women blog for U.S. News and World Report, Deborah Kotz writes a thoughtful analysis, a strong follow-up to the piece she wrote on mammograms, which I praised in a previous post. She notes a report that found that gynecologists have not done a good job of following the current guidelines, so it’s unclear whether they will follow the new ones.

Lauran Neergaard of the AP writes, “First mammograms. Now — in an apparent coincidence — Pap smears.” In the second graf she summarizes the new guidelines. It’s not bad, except for the unfortunate use of the word “apparent.” All the reporting suggests it was a coincidence. The use of “apparent” raises a question.

It appears to be a coincidence, Neergaard’s lede suggests, but is it? It is. Drop “apparent.”

Neergaard does do a deft job, however, of explaining the implications of the news for the Washington health-reform debate. A mark of a Washington pro.

Others:

AFP: US backs new start date for cervical cancer tests.

Jacob Goldstein on the Wall Street Journal Health Blog: Balancing Risks and Benefits of Pap Smears.

Rob Stein at the The Washington Post: Cervical Cancer screening can wait till 21, group says.

Grist for the mill: ACOG press release.

- Paul Raeburn

I just finished writing a post (next one down) on new news that reads like old news, on old news that some take as new news (the croc one below that), and here’s another on new news that feels like same old same old, but is not. The genome for corn, aka maize, is done and is now published in journals. A genome, one thinks. Hmmm. Corn huh? Well whoop de doo. But one story was enough to assure The Tracker that this one really is worth special note.

At the Washington Post David Brown declares that if biologists “had to pick one living thing as the textbook of how genes work” they might say corn. The results, after all and as he notes, are spreaded across 14 papers in this week’s PLoS Genetics and Science. And Brown backs up his lede with info cited from several sources who lay out this plant’s central role in many genetic lines of research and practical application.

One paper in Science even focusses on popcorn. Nonetheless and despite a flood of press releases – as many as I can recall for any single news event -  most reporters appear to have nodded off at word of another genome in the growing annals of such things. A few did write it, sometimes due to local angle.

Other stories:

• Arizona Daily Star – Tom Beal: UA team helps crack genetic code of maize ;
• St. Louis Post Dispatch – Georgina Gustin : Scientists unravel the genetic code of corn ;
• Arizona Republic – Anne Ryman: Research group cracks corn’s genetic code ;
• Scientific American – Katherine Harmon: Cracked Corn: Scientists Solve Maize’s Genetic Maze ; Two plays on word in one hed. The piece is long, detailed, and serious.
• Science News – Tina Hesman Saey: Corn Genome a Maze of Unusual Diversity ;
• Nature News – Elie Dolgin: Maize genome mapped / Sequence should help corn breeders meet global demands for food and fuel ;

Grist for the Mill:

PLoS Genetics Collection Introduction, Links ;

NSF Press Release ;

Plus more, all via EurekAlert, from universities of Iowa ; of  Washington-St.Louis ; of Wisconsin-Madison ; of Minnesota ; of Florida ; of Arizona ; of California-Davis ; from  Cornell ; and from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory ;

- Charlie Petit

It’s happened before and it’s happening again – at the CERN laboratory in catacombs carved ‘neath the French-Swiss border, the Large Hadron Collider is on the short countdown toward loading up on protons and antiprotons and smashing them into one another at relativistic velocity. It could be underway within a day or so.

We all know, in general terms, of the accidents, equipment failures, and difficult repairs that forced previous efforts to a long halt. One place to start for a more detailed reminder, and a relaxed overview, is in the Wall St. Journal and Robert Lee Hotz’s perspective essay.  His theme is that this project is huge and ushers to a new level  Big Science (born long ago in such labs as the Cavendish in the UK and UC Berkeley Radiation Laboratory under Lawrence) that is now pervading all realms of science. Armies of researchers working together are a new norm in many disciplines. Thus, the LHC illustrates a trend.

We’ve been through the specific exercise with the LHC, and reporters are so over their initial dazzlement upon visiting and seeing the stupendous scale of this enterprise and its brobignagian instruments, that the tone of copy we’re now getting is welcome for not being quite so overheated.

Onward. Other Stories:

• NYTimes – Dennis Overbye: Large Hadron Collider to Restart ; After a gimmick lede referring to champagne on ice, Overbye’s story gets serious by declaring, “With little fanfare this time around….”
• And just to show that some people don’t know when a joke has gotten old but get away with it anyway, here in the UK’s The Register is Lewis Page’s LHC dimensional apocalypse from midnight: YOur thoughts ; He reminds readers it could (fat chance) wreak havoc on the universe and selects a few comments that help one reflect on that most unlikely event. It’s all in all a clever, tongue–in-cheek reminiscence on “the splendidly comical global hysteria” of the last time around.
• Here’s his news story – Register – Lewis Page: LHC starts beaming Saturday: Collisions Dec 3 ;
• A less-witty, serious meditation on fringe nonsense is at The Guardian – Euclides Montes: Fear and the Large Hadron Collider ;
• Sydney Morning Herald – Deborah Smith: Atom smasher back on collision course with history ;
• Times (UK) Mark Henderson: Large Hadron Collider to be started up after fault forced year-long closure ;
• Reuters – Jonathan Lynn via ABC : CERN Restarts Big Bang Collider for Biggest Test Yet ;

Grist for the Mill: CERN Press Backgrounder ; LHC Homepage ;

Pic – lots of such animations at LHC site, here.

- Charlie Petit

The Tracker was tempted to get a bit snarky this morning as, once again, the National Geographic Society and it’s fave showman peleontologist, monster fossil digger upper Paul Sereno of the U. of Chicago, have choreographed a flood of publicity for its own magazine article plus TV special on scary dead and vanished things.

But then I  read the perfectly sound news account in UK’s The Register by Ian Sample – a tale of galloping crocodiles and other early oddballs of the clan that lived in what is now the Sahara . Sample was first to tell me that the full paper in the journal ZooKeys is open access . I took a look. It’s hugely long, a 140-page monograph, and a big download. But just scrolling along past all the cladograms and drawings and photos of jumbled and cleaned-up bones from the Cretaceous is mesmerizing. It’s a reminder of the hard, punctilious work that goes into such publications, whether by superstars like Sereno or those laboring in obscurity to get just right their presentation of a new order of funguses. Experts, for all I know, will shred the paper. Maybe an overworked team of post-docs and grad students and field assistants did much of the scutwork. But it sure is impressive to these eyes.

The pic up there is a more or less random screenshot from the paper – of a creature nicknamed boarcroc by the NGS publicity machine. Right here is one of Geographic’s glossy publicity photo-graphic mashups showing Sereno with the giant skull of a megacrocodile Sereno and co-authors reported a while ago. Also there are a few others including the most recent three, previously undescribed species. Several, it says here, walked and ran more like long-legged dogs than today’s distant kin with their splayed limbs.

Several outlets didn’t check the clips, or Wikipedia for that matter, and went with headlines heralding discovery of a supercroc dino-diner rather than the new discoveries. The monograph may be their first fully realized appearance in a journal, but news on the big guy goes way back.

For one example:

• USA Today – Dan Vergano, Oct. 25, 2001: What a croc: Beast ate dinosaurs .

To learn more about today’s news spate, read Sample’s piece and a few of or all these other stories (or venture a dive beyond the press release and into the paper linked well below in Grist):

• Chicago Sun Times – Dave Newbart: Ancient crocs ate dinosaurs ; the dino-eating angle has been reported before, but is IS the title theme of the upcoming TV special.
• Chicago Tribune – William Mullen : U. of C.’s Sereno unveile ancient crocodile fossils ;
• AP – Randolph E. Schmid: 3 new ancient crocodile species fossils found ; One is struck in this solid story that Schmid (or perhaps an editor) felt it important to point out that none were maneaters, 100 million years ago, as there were no people then. Very, very true.
• Reuters : New fossils reveal a world full of crocodiles ; no byline, perhaps as its rewritten so directly from press material, but among the calmer and more informative of the lot.
• Independent (UK) Steve Connor : Scientists unearth ’supercroc’ that dined on dinosaurs / paleontologists uncover five new crocodile species in Sahara ; yes, they have, but only three are newsy new.
• AFP: Five strange ancient crocs found in Sahara desert ;
• Telegraph – Kate Devlin: ‘BoarCroc’ and ‘DuckCroc’ among five ancient species of crocodile discovered ; Excellent, Ms. Devlin – she says plain as day in her 2d graf: “uncovered by Paul Sereno…who famously discovered the species dubbed ‘Supercroc’ in 2001.”
• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Three ancient crocodile species unearthed ; He eschews any more super-croc ink to, smartly, deliver some fascination about how crocs and mammals interacted and competed way back then.
• Nat’l Geographic News – Christine Dell’Amore: 5 ‘Oddball” Crocs Discovered, Including Dinosaur-Eater ; Natch, plenty of links to videos and more pictures and to the TV show site.
• AAAS ScienceNow -  Phil Berardelli: Slideshow: Ancient Crocs with a Dog-Like Walk ;
• … could go on. Let me know if any special ones got omitted.

Grist for the Mill: Nat’l Geographic Society Press Release ; ZooKeys  abstract and Open Access to article (choice of PDF file sizes, both large).

- Charlie Petit

Kathleen Doheny of HealthDay reports this morning, in a story on the US News website, that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said American women should ”keep doing what you’ve been doing for years — talk to your doctor about your individual history, ask questions, and make the decision that is right for you.”

In an item Wednesday on Katie Couric’s Notebook, the CBS evening news anchor says “when it comes to your health, making an informed decision in consultation with your doctor is the wisest thing you can do.”

A blog item on The Baltimore Sun site by Kelly Brewington says, “So, now what? Talk to your doctor, says the panel,” a reference to the government panel that issued the new guidelines.

This is something many of us have written dozens or even hundreds of times. Confused by what we’re reporting? Consult your doctor. Uncertain whether to believe the latest good or bad news about breast cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, or stem cells? Talk to your doctor.

We don’t make this up; we write it because our sources tell us that’s what our readers or listeners should do. But who is helped by that? Most doctors found out about the new mammography guidelines the same time the rest of us did. Some of them might have taken the time to look up the panel’s report and read it. Many probably did not. And few of them are qualified to evaluate it.

That’s true even for oncologists who specialize in breast cancer. They know a lot about how cancer drugs work, and which ones to use in particular circumstances, and when a lumpectomy is the right call. But they may know little about the risks and benefits of mammograms; that’s not their field.

Radiologists know a lot about mammograms, but their expertise is in using them to diagnose cancer, not in population-wide assessments of risks and benefits.

The people who might know something about this are preventive medicine specialists and epidemiologists, or other doctors who have chose to specialize in this kind of public-health analysis in addition to learning to treat disease.

Most readers who see “consult your doctor” do not have a doctor who’s qualified to comment on new research findings. Medical students are not routinely taught research methods. Few study epidemiology or public health. They treat the sick; that’s what they’re good at.

Wait a minute! I’ve got it: “Consult your family’s epidemiologist!”

An obstetrician once complained to my wife, Elizabeth, a medical reporter, about these stories.”Why do you send your readers to us?” she said. “We don’t know what to tell them!”

Starting now, when somebody tells us that readers “should consult their doctors,” we should press them for more than that. What doctors? Who is in a position to provide useful advice on this? Where should readers and listeners go if their doctors don’t have the appropriate expertise, or if they don’t have a doctor?

We owe our audience a little bit more effort on this. Or else we should drop the line, “consult your doctor.” In many cases, it’s worthless advice.

- Paul Raeburn

The last few days a lot of news outlets have buzzed about NASA’s Mars Rover, Spirit, one of her six wheels long lame and all of them now hub deep or deeper in the Columbia Hills that the machine has dutifully explored for five years. Managers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have been unable to figure a successful extrication strategy for months now and are making last, desperate attempts. An alternative is to leave Spirit, or the Spirit, as a parked weather station.

We have a tiny usage issue to entertain us today. The Tracker yesterday read in the New York Times the account of the drama by Kenneth Chang. Something kept bumping on my cerebellum until I finally recognized the reason. The reason is the. Maybe it’s long been NYT’s style, but he called the machine The Spirit, and more than once. There also is a the Opportunity. This is of course consistent with style for most machines and their names – it’s the Hubble, the Queen Mary 2, and the Chevy Volt, after all. But since it’s launch NASA and the scientists who work for it under contract have relentlessly anthropomorphized Spirit and her sibling Opportunity, even noting prominently in literature and interviews that these things are regarded as she things. I for one bought it -  did a whole long article in Nat’l Geographic in NASA’s machine-friendly preferred style.

Then along comes Chang and The Spirit, as he starts one paragraph.

Other outlets tend to do it without that article. At the San Francisco Chronicle today science editor David Perlman eschews the the for Spirit throughout his account (history and small world – and not terribly relevant – note: Perlman helped break Chang into the news biz some years back when the latter did a summer internship in San Francisco).

Ah well. Good tidings, Spirit, whoever or whatever you are.

Other stories:

• Space.com – Andrea Thompson: NASA to begin escape attempt for Mars rover ;
• Los Angeles Times – John Johnson Jr. (Nov 13): For Mars rover Spirit, it’s do or die ; It might live on as a weather station, he reports. But without ability to maneuver for the best angle to the Sun, dead batteries might make that mode a short-lived one.
• AP – Alicia Change (nov. 12): NASA to try to free stuck Mars rover, Spirit. Ah HA, she writes right in the lede “the Spirit!” An ally for NYTimes’s usage? Not really. Her full sentence goes on “…the Spirit may be willing but…” and then it’s good ol’ Spirit the rest of the way.

Grist for the Mill: JPL NASA Press Release ; Exploration Rover Program;

- Charlie Petit

At Science News astro-reporter Ron Cowen has out a well-described, if obscure, slice of news from deep space. He reports on new data, some of it just recently lurking about on the astro-ph arXiv pre-publication website, describing discovery that the long-studied microquasar, Cygnus X-3, makes gamma ray bursts along with other long-known ructions. This in turn may help explain the physics of an object that acts a bit like a quasar – those things in galactic hearts that betray supermassive black holes – but probably is at heart merely a very busy neutron star or stellar mass black hole.

What catches the eye is his mention that several of the researchers with new data on the object would not speak with Cowen as their report is pending in Science. But other scientists, their paper similarly working its way toward publication in Nature, felt free to speak with him. Much of the news is already in circulation among experts, via a meeting earlier this month as well as the on line arXiv site. This seems to be more reason to suspect that embargoes by such august journals to be artificial and presumptuous until shown otherwise. The Tracker is not urging anybody to just ignore embargoes of news without doing some digging to see if the news is already effectively out – but I also predict that embargoes will continue to skid as information these days gets ever-more slippery.

Grist for the Mill: arXiv Discovery of extreme particle acceleration in hte microquasar Cygnus X-3 ;

- Charlie Petit

A reader* tips me to a remarkable little video and little story on news that first broke on what, in most of the world, are among the more obscure news feeds. In Indonesian waters a Japanese aquarium’s expedition, running a remotely controlled submersible, caught a glimpse of a very small and young, blue, spotted, coelecanth swimming calmly across a rocky sea floor. It’s just about the size of a decent trout. Adults are more like groupers. Quite nice.

Stories:

• Japan Times: Aquarium snaps world’s first photos of young coelecanth;
• Brisbane Times: No story, but it HAS THE VIDEO ‘ , courtesy of Reuters.
• AFP: Japanese researchers film rare baby fish ‘fossil’ ; OK, this is not an obscure service.
• Daily Mail: Scientists capture world’s first images of baby coelacanth fish – dubbed a ‘living fossil’ ;

*Now I know two of Lynne Friedmann’s abiding interests. One is Mount Wilson Observatory, as previously noted in posts. Today it is coelecanths. Thx for the tip;

- Charlie Petit