Tomorrow – Thursday, Nov. 26 – is Thanksgiving Holiday in the US and therefore, as we take Friday off too, there won’t be much if any new stuff on ksjtracker till next Monday.  Happy Thanksgiving all of you here in Yankee Doodle Dandy land and equally to all of you among the 44% of our readers in other lands (fyi, our readers, in rank order for the first ten after the US, are from Canada, UK, France, Germany, Australia, Spain, Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, and India with scores of more nations on the list).

The Tracker was planning a round up of several stories about turkeys. But one is so good it will do. It is like a junior high school report, except that it’s by a grown-up, thorough reporter. You all probably remember the style. State a fact (or what sure looks like one). State another one. Then the next one. Keep on going. Use a lot of declarative sentences. Transitions need not appear. Don’t confuse readers with complex imagery, roundabout syntax, or efforts at jokes (the story below  does essay some sly humor re the alleged stupidity of turkeys).  After reading this, I know a lot more about turkeys.

It’s by a reporter at a little paper in the hills inland and north of San Francisco and not far from where we live. At the moment, however, Mr. and Mrs. Tracker are with a daughter, son, son-in-law, and three grandchildren near Disneyland. A butterball totally non-wild, almost surely factory-raised and not particularly well-treated-when-it-was-alive turkey is in the fridge while onions and other stuffing stuff are made ready.There are cranberries too. Another mother-in- law will bring mashed potatoes. A brother-in-law of daughter and his new wife have pie duty. Carrots and green beans are on view. Mrs. Tracker is chopping things. Everything at hand is good. Thank you very much.

• Lake County Record-Bee – Terry Knight: Domesticated, wild turkeys have little in common ;

- Charlie Petit

The Tracker this morning happened on a lively piece at DiscoveryNews by Irene Klotz, called Lightning’s gamma rays may destroy matter. The news is that, earlier this month, users of NASA’s Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope reported at a meeting that – while mainly gazing into deep space – they picked up bursts of gamma rays from Earth’s atmosphere. Their spectra suggest they arise from the decay of positrons, and those in turn are the debris from energies so intense that subatomic particles fly around (Tracker is too lame to look anything up, hence the vagueness of that). And that’s not the sort of thing that happens often on Earth outside of big accelerators, or at least so it was thought.

Neat story, and The Tracker figured this has gotta be a scoop or I’d have heard about it before. But not so. For one, hints of such gamma rays have been around for more than ten years, but not with the positron antimatter angle. More important, this specific bit of weird physics antimatter-related data has been making low-key news for weeks. But it has not made the wires or other major services, near as I can tell. Klotz gives the news the well-rounded composition that it merits. But one or two outlets did jump on it already.

And the Bing, Google, and by Golly Search Says:

• Science News – Ron Cowen (Nov. 6 via Wired Science): Signature of Antimatter Detected in Lightning ; Also in SNews’s hardcopy Dec. 5 issue.
• Symmetry Magazine – Calla Cofield (Nov 6) : Antimatter from lightning flashes the Fermi space telescope ; This is Fermilab’s and SLAC’s trade magazine, but includes a very tidy explanation of what’s new in this, and what has been surmised before about so-called Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes, or TGFs.

Grist for the Mill:

• 2009 Fermi Symposium abstract: Fermi-GBM Obsservations of Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes.
• 2008 NASA Press Release on another satellite, more on TGFs.

- Charlie Petit

The beat goes on as media hunch up to cover the Copenhagen talks (even if it’s become unlikely to do much beyond set a date perhaps to get something tough done). The AP and BBC in particular rolled out two hefty enterprise yarns.

• AP – John Heilprin : CO2 curve ticks upward as key climate talks loom ; This, one infers, stems in part from a journalism workshop/fellowship at Honolulu’s East-West Center. He starts off on the slope of Mauna Loa, at the climate observatory that keeps the globe’s best record of CO2. Tracker learned something – unlike a recent post where I asserted it’s hit 390 ppm, says here I’m way off. That’ll happen in a few months. He fills it out with broad perspective and glum expectations from scientists. The lede refers to a “troubling upward curve.” The last line says, “…it’s going to stay there for thousands of years.”
• BBC – Michael Hirst, Kate McGeown: Rising sea levels: A tale of two cities ; More of a report than polemic or yarn, the package offers a summary of sea level worries up front, then visits to two cities with a common problem but drastically different plans and means to deal with it – Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and Maputo in Mozambique. Read the section called “adaptation.” One nation is building schools with strong roofs – to hold people during floods. The other is building monster barriers so the floods may not come.

A few other stray climate stories for the day:

• Reuters – Alister Doyle: Climate change quickens, seas feared up 2 meters ;
• Reuters – Dina Zayed: Climate change to hit water-scarce Arab world hard ;
• Reuters – Stuart Grudgings : Amazon forest schemes await strong climate pact ; Or, a visit to the other end of your carbon offset. Fine, evocative, atmospheric lead vignette.
• AP – Julie Pace : Obama to outline US climate goals at Copenhagen ; This heavily covered news, which broke this morning, may get its ledes from the President’s plan to be there but the real news is that Obama plans to vow, with or without legislation, a  cut in US fossil carbon emissions below 2005’s level that will reach 17 percent by 2020.

Meanwhile….another kind of worst case scenario.

• Fox News – John Lott: WhyYou Should Be Hot and Bothered About ‘Climate-gate” ; If you’ve wondered how an economist who wrote “Freedomnomics” sums up the Univ. of East Anglia emails, here it is.

Grist for the Mill: COP15 Copenhagen official site ;

- Charlie Petit

In New Scientist its former editor in chief, Alun Anderson, essays on the past and future Arctic with an expert’s eye. He starts with only a thin faint knell of foreboding, in a reminiscence of a polar bear he met as a postdoc aboard a research vessel years ago, he works through well-observed if somewhat standard signs of change and how they will work out; writing like the pro he is he works the reader into sharing his vision of a world coming to evermore abundant life – yet also a drum-pounding scene of death.

The punch in the face is just a short section, a surmise really, that makes sense (and while this is primarily essay, he does cite an authority to give his speculation some heft). As the climate changes, so will the wildlife. The new creatures up there will be, The Tracker appreciates fully only after reading this, familiar ones to us. Salmon and haddock – and killer whales with bold dorsal fins slicing through the nigh-iceless main. Polar bears, walruses, beluga, narwhal? Fade, fade, fade. One can extend his musings. Adios ringed seals on the floes, ditto for harp seals that no Greenpeace campaign may save from the clubbing of the new maritime regime. Fin whales and blues may find a new place to prosper. Gray’s will frequent the whole Arctic shelf. But what of the bowhead? Sigh.

Be thankful to have lived when the old Arctic could still be glimpsed – if you can put up with the collective guilt.

Pic: Ocas off Antarctica, photo by Jeanne Cato, NSF ; source;

- Charlie Petit

One quickly gets over a first suspicion that Cornelia Dean scored a soft assignment to visit a tropical paradise for an eco-tourism semi-vacation writing and frolicking assignment. She lands the lead spot in the section following a trip to what she describes as an impoverished, decidedly non-luxury, and polluted town on the Dominican Republic’s coast. Invasive species are even mucking up the waterways. But, she writes, it has enormous geographic appeal as a potential tourist hot spot. The story is one of environmental tactics for handling with grace an almost certain wave of change. Locals and rather academic outsiders are trying to find a way to bring in tourists without, one gathers, the town’s own people being shoved aside and left dispirited by developers, giant hotels, and private beaches while limited to marginalized jobs as maids, trinket sellers, and tour guides in a place they can barely recognize anymore. Success, she writes, is no sure thing.

Other notable headlines:

• Sean B. Carroll (noted biologist): In Snails and Snakes, Features to Delight Darwin ; A fascinating and well-done look into biology and evolution’s convoluted dance. (By the way, and pertinent to a post Paul Raeburn put in a short scroll down on NYTimes puzzlements, and on which I put an overlong comment, Professor Carroll does a great job but quotes no authority other than Darwin and he cites few others. It’s a newspaper story, but not typical news reporting. )
• Natalie Angier : The Biology Behind the Milk of Human Kindness ; Oxytocin and  Thanksgiving ( and the way a few molecules can seriously upset one’s vain belief in one’s free will and cool logic).
• Nicholas Wade - Museum Is Displaying Treasures of the Other Evolution Pioneer ; The treasured but long-unappreciated chest of specimens gathered by Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin’s fellow discoverer of natural selection, are going on view. He tells the back story well (One must note that it’s been told before. As by Joel Achenbach at Wapost.)
• Kenneth Chang – How Hummingbirds Get Their Nectar With Tiny ‘Straws’: One of several briefs for The Observatory roundup. Its basic news – how animals manage to sip through teeny straws – as it happens has another illus circulating but this one involves butterflies: AIP/EurekAlert Press Release ;
• Pam Belluck – Sounds During Sleep May Aid Memory, Study Says ; One of the more surprising articles. But no, one can’t receive instruction very effectively while asleep, her sources say. But one may be prodded into cementing better the things one sort-of just learned while awake.

As usual, much more. Whole Section;

- Charlie Petit

Many of us on the science beat have bit time and again on entrepreneurial efforts to build cheap space ships that aim to usher in a new and genuine space age for the rest of us. Most come to nothing, and those that don’t start getting pricy. But maybe, huh? And for those of us who follow these things, one of the big kahunas who has eluded press inquiry most successfully is the Blue Origin project based near Seattle with testing grounds in Texas. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has nurtured it for years while providing hardly any detail.

This morning a few outlets, most prominently MSNBC thanks to the CosmicLog site with Alan Boyle at the helm, brings word that the venture has announced selection of three research payloads for what could be its niche-market entry into full-on commercial space exploration. Its first rockets will be suborbital, vertical take-off and landing jobs, rather reminiscent of Pete Conrad’s old DC-X thing that flew over New Mexico in the 1990s. As reporteda year or two ago by several outlets it calls the prototype, now making test flights, New Shepard. Boyle’s piece includes some context, including a list of some other small companies hoping to do roughly the same thing.

Other stories:

• Orlando Business Journal: UCF experiment to fly on new rocket ship;
• Space.com – Leonard David: Jeff Bezos’s Secretive Rocket Program Picks Science Projects ;

Grist for the Mill:

Blue Origin Opportunities for Research announcement ;

Univ. Central Florida Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

This is more like it. The Large Hadron Collider is getting the sort of coverage in keeping with merely turning the thing on. After two episodes in the last year or two of slavering and long curtain raisers by writers utterly blown away by the machine’s physical grandeur, we’re getting tidy stories saying it seems to work. It is a bit like the commissioning of the first of a new class of aircraft carrier. It’s news, but the heart of the event itself is that it floats, doesn’t sag at the stern or bow, the screw turns, elevators work, the whistle toots. It hasn’t however as yet stifled a war by sheer threat or defeated any on-coming enemy armadas. A throng has written that the LHC seems to be floating this time – more precisely, the protons go around, they respond to increased urge from the magnets and electrical coils, and they can be made to hit one another head on. So, in a pro forma exercise pending news that this cathedral of high energy physics and natural philosophy has found a Higgs boson (or, better, something completely unexpected …. or has found nothing at all despite working perfectly), which will merit extravagant headlines and column inches, here  is… A sampling of the latest coverage:

• AP – Alexander B. Higgins: Big Bang atom smasher starts speeding proton beams ; Must give pride of place to a reporter whose very byline sends a resonant shiver down one’s synapses, prepping one to expect a reference to the elusive Higgs. But he doesn’t do it – perhaps because he does not have to.
• Register (UK) Lewis Page: Collisions at LHC! Tevatron record to be broken soon? ; Quite aside from a hed evoking competitive tension, Page is in full-on overheated Brit speak mode here. How can one not relish such concoctions as “since…an unfortunate electro-burnout liquid helium superfluid explosion mishap, top boffins have toiled like gnomes in tunnels buried deep…” and so extravagantly on. Do read it. It is a light but introspective look into the heart of journalism as seen from the “particle-punisher desk” and a clean look at LHC’s agenda.
• Reuters – Jason Rhodes: Big Bang machine achieves first particle collisions;  One wonders who first dubbed it the big bang machine. A publicist, or news writer? ; Rhodes suggests, while not quite saying so, that it will be coming to full power in the next few months. Other reports are that, pending rewiring of critical circuits, full power may take a year or more.
• NYTimes – Dennis Overbye: Near Geneva, Particles Finally Come Together With a Bang ; He writes, “Call it first bang,” and neatly tells us that this time the commissioning is going surprisingly quickly and smoothly. The news is reported comfortably inside the front section – not even in the science section.
• AFP: Success for Large Hadron Collider as first atom smashed ; Smashed an atom, huh? Technically, a proton is an ionized hydrogen atom. An anti-proton, that’d be a stretch. The hed, one guesses, is one that the writer did not write.
• Times (UK) – Mark Henderson: “Big bang’ machine achieves its first particle collisions ;
• Christian Science Monitor (blog) Pete Spotts: Large hadron collider awakens after long repair outage ; No hyperventilation from Spotts – but it is light and to the point and, in its bloggy way, links to archived stories with more detail.
• …. could go on all morning….Let me know if any particularly astounding stories remain that ought to be recognized.
• Oh, one more: AAAS Science Insider – Adrian Cho: Physicists Back Where They Started As Supercollider About to Circulate Beams ; Written a few days ago, before the beams circulated, but it does bring us up to speed on the status of legal challenges from those worried that a mini black hole will drift from the LHC to the Earth’s core and doom us. And in the comments is a link to two German chemists’ explanation why they think so (yes, it’s dense).

Eventual Big Science story angle department: The Tracker needs not be clever to predict that, if the Higgs with its mass-manifesting scalar field shows up, its eponym Peter Higgs of the UK will be on the short list of speculation for a Nobel. But there are, a quick check shows, half a dozen scientists who did seminal work leading to today’s rendition of the Higgs hypothesis. So that’ll be a tangle – who gets a prize from a committee that so far hasn’t ever split it more than three ways? (Plus, how to recognize the boson’s discoverers, should it occur – there will be perhaps hundreds of  author names, many of them big cheese PIs, on the paper).

- Charlie Petit

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