Friday was dreadful, speaking as one who does not pretend to be a disinterested reporter when it comes to declaring out loud the difference between what NASA does that is important to science and history, versus what it does that is nostalgic techno-jingoism. NASA’s honchos made public their strategy – with prime input presumably from the White House – for dealing with a shrinking budget and a universe that has gotten no smaller.

After a brief summary I’ll track some of the news. Then comes a mini-essay.

Solar system exploration is in for a major hatchet job, including new generations of Mars rovers, samplers, orbiters, plus more such magical gadgets as the Dawn Mission to asteroids that go to scads of other things orbiting our Sun. At least two collaborative missions to Mars with ESA are out and Russia may take over the US role. NASA leaders described the basics on Friday and the President is making the intentions official today with announcement of his overall proposed 2013 budget.

The flurry on Friday started too late for slow-reacting me to put a post up then.

Stories on Friday or a tad earlier included:

• Washington Post – Brian Vastag: Obama’s budget would cut Mars program, solar system exploration ; Vastage made lots of calls to insiders, has the quotes to show.
• AP – Seth Borenstein: With country facing red ink, scientists say NASA is scaling back on exploring red planet; Notes that Ed Weiler, long time manager of space science and well-known to those on the NASA beat,  quit his job late last year due to cuts in the Mars program that he had already seen, with more clearly on the way.
• Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts: Red Planet meets red ink: budget ax could chop two NASA Mars missions ; Spotts writes: “To be sure, whatever the president sends to Capitol Hill on Monday only begins the budget conversation for fiscal years 2013, experts caution.” He also notes a highly pertinent stat that still surprises some people:” NASA accounts for only 0.5 percent of the federal budget. But it falls under the broad category of discretionary spending – easiest to pare…” ;
• Wired – Adam Mann: U.S. Space Science Confronts New Economic Reality ; Not just Mars probes are at stake. So are telescopes – and not just the space telescopes.
• BBC – Jonathan Amos: ExoMars co-operation between Nasa and Esa near collapse;

A few that have landed since:

• Universe Today – Ken Kremer: Budget Axe to Gore America’s Future Exploration of Mars and Search for Martian Life ; Good summary, with acknowledgment of other outlets’ reporting.
• Space.com: Highlights of Obama’s 2013 NASA Budget Proposal ;
• AFP – Obama budget slashes Mars exploration ;
• Florida Today/Gannett – Ledyard King: NASA budget calls for ‘difficult choices’ ; Lays the blame for cuts on Webb. And mentions restoring Clinton-era taxes on higher-earners as necessary just to have enough for the proposed overall federal budget.
• Washington Post – Joel Achenbach:NASA’science missions bring the universe into sharper focus even as agency struggles with manned flight ; A wide-angle look at NASA and why it can’t do it all.
• Washington Post – Brian Vastag (blog today): Mars program takes a hit in NASA’s flat budget ;
• Bryan Berger, Dan Leone: NASA funding cuts coming, space exploration to suffer ; This says OMB’s recommendations were mostly for even deeper cuts.
• BBC – Paul Rincon: Nasa budget slashes Martian funds ;

Grist for the Mill:

White House/OMB Press Release on whole budget, NASA part is here.

Planetary Society Press Release ;

One big reason for America’s looming space science withdrawal is to maintain a vigorous exploration program, and in NASA-talk exploration doesn’t include the work of relatively affordable robots. It means very expensive people in space ships with closets full of bespoke space suits and cosmic ray shelters and triple-redundancy on everything to keep things tolerably safe, venturing back to the Moon and eventually an asteroid or two, plus Mars. It means continuation of the legacy of Apollo, truly an epochal time and no mistake but not productive scientifically. We will become a space-faring species, there is little doubt of that, and the US ought to lead the expansion. We should not undermine the sapient  part of Homo sapiens in our rush. Another reason, to be sure, lies within the space science directorate: The James Webb Telescope, heir to Hubble’s legacy, is costing a whole lot more than planned.

Am I wrong about this? Does the public, as Congress seems to think, really confuse a successful space program with one that puts American flags into space and that are sewn into the clothing of US citizens? Does the vastly greater web traffic interest in unmanned planetary and cometary and other-ary missions, compared to those who latch on to the latest housekeeping and taxicab doings at the International Space Station, merely reflect a minor percentage of Americans who bother to follow NASA at all closely? ISS is magnificent, the design ingenious, the construction heroic. But what does it do?  I am admittedly relying on memory of how the internet stats were overwhelmingly in favor of robotic missions to really far off places some years ago. Has that switched? Are kids more likely to study science and engineering so they can design a few spaceships that go to limited places, and just maybe maybe ride in one, than to design swarms of space probes and telescopes that explore the entire universe? I’m never going to the Moon and neither I’ll bet have you. But six years ago we already went to Titan, spiritually aboard a little machine called Huygens that the European Space Agency built and that NASA flew to Saturn piggy-back on its Cassini probe.

All I know for sure is that the space station comes up in news and at ksjtracker only when the logistics of keeping it running and rotating its crews comes along. That, and disasters. By contrast, NASA news from space telescopes looking way way out there or machines roaming the solar system arises all the time. They DO interesting things.

One more thing: What are the chances that the Kepler Mission, one of the most wildly successful space telescopes ever launched and a steady font of good news for NASA and the USA, would have gotten done if it were still on the to-do list in the present budgetary climate?

Vaguely pertinent news (since on Friday we DID post on a new, mostly Italian launcher):

• Reuters – Jessy Xavier, Alexander Miles: Europe’s first Vega rocket blasts off successfully ;

- Charlie Petit

An unusual series of comments has piled up a few posts down (straight to it here). This is merely to point the discussion out in a fresh post, and while at it to make a few observations.

Four days ago the ksjtracker noted that a major news story, of a few days before that, had put some members of two teams of scientists at odds over proper scientific protocol and recognition of primacy. At issue is the split in credit for discovery of a delectably located planet, a good deal larger than Earth but still probably rocky and perhaps wet. It is smack in the habitability zone of its red dwarf star.

Those of us interested in an illustrative episode in the way academics are dealing with the meaning of “publication” and formal ways to establish credit for discovery or invention will find it fascinating. It also is a story for reporters to follow, but the main questions have little to do with urgent journalism. The big, but in the larger scheme fleeting, news was covered just fine: this planet is a step toward finding a true Earth twin. It circles the smallest member of a triple system call GJ 667 for its entry in an astronomical ledger, the Gliese Catalog of Nearby Stars.  The planet is in the ballpark of sharing important specifications of Earth ; roughly the same size, mass, perhaps composition, and almost surely a similar energy input from its star. This one falls a bit short of filling the whole bill. All the stats could be closer.  Another Earth’s mass ought’a be within a few jots of our Earth’s heft. It should have similar orbit of a sunlike G star (yellow dwarf) rather than a piddly, red M-dwarf. A big moon would be nice, if there is a way to detect such a thing.

Better other-Earths seem inevitable and will be bigger news. Spectacular news will come when (and if) somebody builds spectrometers able to tell if an extrasolar planet’s atmosphere is out of equilibrium in a way explainable by life’s chemical vigor. Even better than that could come if the near-mythical Planet Imager space mission NASA once entertained, and that will likely get built sometime by somebody in the next 100 years, returns pictures of continents, oceans, maybe cloud formations a bit like in that artist’s impression up to the right. For that, one guesses, GJ 667 Cc would actually be high on the target list: sort of big, sort of earthy, very close by at 22 light years, and given that its sun is a dim red dwarf, easier to see in the IR through its star’s glare. Just guessing on that last score. I don’t do astronomy.  I just read about it and take notes on what experts say.

So, this being an incremental advance and hardly in itself something on which paradigms or big prizes hinge, the primacy issue has little meaning for the general public or most reporters. But for professional astronomy’s scholars, there presumably is keen interest in which team – the Swiss group using its HARPS data (High Accuracy Radial Planet Searcher) gathered by ESO’s grand telescope in Chile , or the Santa Cruz.Lick-Carnegie bunch which used HARPS’s open-access archives plus more data gathered by the HIRES spectrometer at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii – stuck to the rules of scientific publication and acknowledgment. Discussion of ArXiv’s place in the publishing and citation world may heat up. Maybe neither team behaved just fine, maybe both did, maybe just one. I can’t guess. But the comments to the earlier post by several, including some of the authors, have laid out both group’s positions.

Some science reporter, one expects, will be laying all this out coherently pretty soon.

- Charlie Petit

In French Guiana, site of most launches by the European Space Agency and commercial launch companies based mainly on the continent, a new rocket called Vega is nearing its first launch. Wasting no time on a shakedown test, it has a payload of nine scientific satellites for injection into low Earth orbit. Italy paid most of the development cost, Reuters‘s Alexander Miles reports, with the price tag thus far pegged at around a billion Euros.

The Vega is a medium-lift vehicle, smaller and presumably less costly than the venerable Ariane famiily of rockets that have been flying since the early 1980s. It is about 30 meters, or roughly 100 feet high, and can carry as much as 2500 kg or around 5500 pounds of cargo to orbit. It has solid fuel lower stages and liquid upper stage. The Reuters story reviews the reliability record of Ariane launches, declares that Vega is intended to be just as good, and reports “Potential competitors.. notably from the United States, have had more problems. One, it reports, the Falcon 1 launcher from private company SpaceX, has only one flight scheduled – in 2015. That seems misleading, as SpaceX has turned its attention to a successor rocket, the larger Falcon 9. Were this a longer examination of launcher competition, it might also have looked into how the development cost of Vega compares to that of government-contracted rockets in the US as well as those from private companies. And what do the recycled Russian missiles used for similar, smaller payloads cost? However things turn out it does have a tidy, workmanlike look to it, sitting there ready for its big test.
Other Vega Rocket Stories:

• NatureNews – Nicola Nosengo (Jan 31): Vega rocket aims to make space research affordable ; Much more detail on history, as well as on the payload. Unusual for a first test flight, it is a real, working cargo including sophisticated research satellites. One will check the spacetime warping phenomenon known as the Lense-Thirring effect, an expression of General Relativity.
• Spaceflight Now – Stephen Clark: Assembly complete for Vega rocket’s first mission ;
• Space.com – Charles Q. Choi: Europe’s Newest Rocket to Launch on Maiden Voyage Monday ; Includes an ESA video with a well-explained history of its development and structure – narrated by what is clearly an American.
• Universe Today – Ken Kremer: Inaugural Vega Rocket Poised at Europe’s South American Spaceport ; Most photos of the bunch.
• Aviation Week – Amy Svitak: Vega Launcher Targets Government Market ; With a followup on launch date’s slip.

Grist for the Mill: ESA Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

This is a blog of no theme. Things felt rather slow on the science news front this morning, which can be a liberating thing. That left no alternative but the on line equivalent of window shopping and book-store browsing. During this stroll, a punch on the Time Magazine feed led to a laid-back and reflective film review by Michael Lemonick, who has an appreciation there for a dark sky and its salutary impact on the psyche, plus of course its benefits for astronomy. The video that inspired him is The City Dark. It would appear to be a good one (Its site says it’s showing this weekend in Santa Fe. and in Princeton which is why Lemonick reviewed it). Mike has hit a sweet spot, one guesses, in his distinguished career. He’s on staff at the non-profit Climate Central in Princeton, writing for it regularly. Here’s his piece for C.C.on the warm January the US had this year, as opposed to the deep freeze across much of Eurasia. He also still writes often for Time, which he left – as a staffer – a while ago after 21 years as a science and enviro writer. He got to have it both says: leave, and stay.

So as I was saying, while noodling the morning away, a bit surprised to be at work at all while grateful that a jury pool I’d been called by Alameda County to attend was dismissed yesterday before even meeting and yet a small bit regretful not to have a shot at being a consequential part of a trial, I had time to look at some of the other stuff with links on the same page as carries Lemonick’s review of the dark sky film.

Which is where I became doubtlessly far from the first among ksjtracker’s wonderful readership to be acquainted with the videos that self-proclaimed Earth’s Premier Science Comedian Brian Malow produces for Time. I may have heard his act at a AAAS meeting some years ago, but am unsure. I think he lives in San Francisco.  But I can tell you this, he is a fraud. I mean that of course in the nicest possible way. This is a serious man who happens to have a cheerful manner, a witty way, and deep curiosity. Some say comics are the most serious observers of all, the ones who look reality in the face so intently they are horrified and thus must protect themselves from depression by sharing jokes. But that’s not exactly what Malow does. He seem genuinely amused by what he sees. The amusement is infectious.  He doesn’t depend on broad parodies or word goofiness with science jargon or limericks on neutrinos or mumbling with great hilarity about the idiocy of popular wisdom. Word play, sure, but he’s mainly just a friendly guy sharing the neat stuff he just did or learned.

The first video of his I watched, the one just under Lemonick’s dark sky review, is a straight, descriptive, evocative, and only occasionally giggle-interrupted report on the William Herschel Space Observatory, an infrared telescope the European Space Agency put up in 2009. I think the video is a year or two old, but I’d not seen it. It’s not a heavy-duty Nova or Nat’l Geographic Special, but polished enough. It is a dead-on explanation what the telescope does, why it’s important to science, and why one can take happy satisfaction that there is enough loose change rattling around in the coffers of governments to build such sublime things for no reason other than to learn about things of no apparent practical use. Actually there is practical use: to inspire kids to study science and thus get the chops to do other, practical things of a technical nature. Basic science is how society mesmerizes and inspires enough people to have many of them wind up doing applied science and engineering. That’s how it more than pays for itself.

I don’t know how often Malow’s videos appear at Time. The most recent appears to be on a slightly goofy visit to Kennedy Space Center last year to watch the last takeoff of a shuttle. The whole collection appears to be here. Putting the label ‘comedy and humor’ on his stuff may be disarming, and bring an audience that wouldn’t click through to a realm of “science and technology.” Nonetheless, Mr. Malow is an exemplary science reporter.

He does, by the way, do stand up too.

- Charlie Petit

Here’s a little episode -  in this world of instant e-publishing, open-access-everything, and large international teams of scientists rolling their data out lickety split – that seems worth a few followup calls from any astronomy reporter interested in the sociology, collaboration, and competition of science.

In case you missed it, we received a very interesting comment on the post that ran a few days ago about  GJ 667Cc, the apparent super-Earth in the habitable zone of a red dwarf star 22 light years away. It is from Markus Pössel, an astronomer and also a press officer for the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg. He wonders whether we have a fine example of the ambiguity of discovery. Our post on the recent news is just a few below this one, but here is his comment again in full:

——————–

I do see your point about “mass” vs. “size. But apart from that, there’s also an elephant in the room. It’s this E-print here by Bonfils et al.: http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.5019v2 – published on astro-ph in November 2011.

It’s based on the HARPS data also mostly used by the UCSC/Carnegie group who are now reported in the popular press as the discoverers GJ 667Cc (in fact, the article is by the people who built HARPS and actually took the data). The preprint identifies GJ 667Cc, gives its orbital period, gives a mass estimate not dissimilar to the one by Anglada-Escudé et al., and hypothesizes that it could be a habitable planet, since it gets about 90% the amount of radiation the Earth gets from the Sun.

So who’s the discoverer of the new planet? The preprint by Bonfils et al. was out in electronic form earlier, but the article is not accepted in any journal. It also references, for GJ 667Cc, an article that is still “in preparation”. On the other hand, it does give the basic parameters, and shows that Bonfils et al. evidently found GJ 667Cc in their HARP data. Anglada-Escudé et al. cite this preprint, although if you only browse their article cursorily, you might miss the fact that “similar to one of the candidates reported here” refers to GJ 667Cc that everyone is now making such a fuss about.

There are some subtleties here involving priority in the age of electronic publishing; the way the story is now widely reported seems blatantly unfair, though. And so far, I haven’t come across anyone reporting this. / Markus Pössel

————————————

I pasted up there top right one of the pertinent grafs in the November paper on the arXiv watering hole server for physics and astronomy reports that haven’t yet and some of which never will hit a journal. It is 70+ pages long and covers a huge range of data from many stars. Reporters may be forgiven for not poring through it for any habitable-zone super-Earths. One thinks, again, somebody in the reporting business ought to call around now, if they have not already, and find out if there is an issue here.

Notably, the authors of these two papers include some of the towering figures in extrasolar planet history. The paper to which Dr. Pössel refers includes among its authors Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, the first – in 1995 – to announce discovery of a planet, a “hot Jupiter,” using the Doppler shift method of planet detection. Last week’s paper’s  authors include Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institute, one half of the team (Geoff Marcy the other ) that was neck and neck with Mayor and Queloz in developing the method and went on within months to become its most prolific practitioners. Another of the authors in this week’s paper, Steve Vogt of UC Santa Cruz and Lick Observatory, worked closely with Marcy and Butler in those days on spectroscopy advances. So, there are bigshots in the mix.

I forwarded the comment to Butler and Vogt.

This shows why it can pay off big to call outsiders about a prominent team’s research. A savvy reporter would have  known that the Lick-Carnegie team that was in the news this week is the descendant of  the earlier Marcy-Butler planet-finding factory. It wouldn’t have taken inspiration to have contacted Mayor or Queloz or others in their group in Europe to ask for its take on the new report’s significance. It would have been a delightful moment for such hypothetical, diligent reporter to get in reply something like “Oh, that super-Earth. We already published on it.”

Late Addition: A little bird tells us that one press release has been updated to say the new paper confirms the previous one: Planetary Habitability Laboratory Press Release ;

*UPDATE: In the European magazine Ciel & Espace, David Ditch has a conversation with the lead author of the November paper, Xavier Bonfils of the Astrophysics Laboratory in Grenoble. The link goes to the Google translation of the article and it’s not bad for robot work. Bonfils exclaims, in this rendering, “We know the existence of Gliese 667Cc for several months!” The story’s lede holds that the American team merely rediscovered it. Thanks to commenter Daniel Fischer for leading us to the link.

- Charlie Petit

Ria Novosti graphic

No, nothing here about German submarines and cloning Hitler. Two days after a tabloid-fodder news burst (earlier post, or just scroll down) on Russia’s Vostok Station and the drilling program there that has been trying to years to reach ancient Lake Vostok 2+ miles down through the ice, several services report the basics were true. So says the head of Russia’s Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute.

At AP, Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow – with an assist by Seth Borenstein in DC – reported it, including a Russian sentiment that the US may have gotten a person to the moon first, but this race to be first into a deep subglacial lake in Antarctica’s heart is comparable. Maybe there’ll be a damp Russian flag down there some day – like the one near the North Pole and deep under the arctic sea ice and water column. The Russians, it says here, are being as careful as they can. Long term plans include running submersibles in the lake (small ones, of course, unless a far wider hole is in store). And in a light note, the program boss said nobody is going to start bottling Lake Vostok water and selling it.( But what, one wonders, if it tastes fabulous, is carbonated by nature, has digestion-aiding microbes like nature’s own super yogurt, something like that…???).

  It says here that the drill team, which made haste to leave the project till next year’s summer, allowed some of the lake water to rise into the drill string a short distance, got evidence it froze, and will let next year’s crew retrieve some for analysis. Seems entirely sensible. No fear, one gathers, that when they get back then will find that the whole lake has geysered back up the pipe, lacquered the landscape in fresh ice suffused with tiny, dead, alien-looking beasties, and generally written fiasco on the whole deal. But wouldn’t that be a story?

Other stories:

• Ria Novosti: Russia Confirms Drilling into Sub-Glacial Antarctic Lake ;
• BBC – Jonathan Amos: Lake Vostok drilling team claims breakthrough ; In the earlier reporting one noticed that several accounts compared Lake Vostok’s extent to Lake Ontario. Amos does too but add a more apt comparison: Lake Baikhal.
• Reuters – Alissa de Carbonnel: Russia reaches ancient Antarctic lake . Scientists suspect lake hides unknown life forms ; Poetic license, perhaps, but “unknown life forms” does seem strong. A new life form, to fill that bill, would need a form that is unlike the families, genera, and species already in the ledgers. Are there scientists who actually expect to find a novel new life form? Don’t pin this on Carbonnel – she just refers to unknown organisms.
• ABC – Ned Potter: Lake Vostok: Russian Scientists Claim Success in Antarctic ;
• National Geographic Daily News: Christine Dell’Amore: Russian Scientists Breach Antarctica’s Lake Vostok – Confirmed ; Nice job, fairly long, with reaction and insight from US sources to complement the official announcement from Moscow.
• ScienceInsider – Carolyn Gramling: Russians Drill Into Subglacial antarctic Lake Vostok ;
• New York Times – David M. Herszenhorn, James Gorman: Russian Scientists Bore Into Ancient Antarctic Lake ; Fine ode to the Russian effort, which required heroic means and persistence to drill so deep through solid ice in the coldest environment on Earth. It is unclear which of the writers, or both, are in Moscow but that’s the dateline.
• LiveScience/Our Amazing Planet via Chr. Science Monitor – Andrea Mustain: Russian scientists bore into massive ancient lake, prompt contamination concerns ;
• Forbes – Alex Knapp: Russian Scientists Successfully Drill To Subglacial Antarctic Lake Vostok ; Good for Knapp, he links to the Russian press release. Looks like it anyway – but it’s in cyrillic. It’s a short story, good enough, but prompts a note to the headline writer and anybody else who writes. If they drilled to the lake, they did it successfully. That’s implicit and not obscurely so. “Successfully” is an easy word to mistake for something that imparts extra information. Too often, it does not. In this case, it adds zilch.
• RT (Russia) ‘We raised 40 liters of water’: Details of Lake Vostok drill success ; Very enthusiastic account, full of detail and ambiguity. It does not make clear whether the water that rose into the pipe was somehow captured at the surface or is still at the far bottom of the drill string, frozen. The team, it says here, is bringing some sort of sample home. Perhaps it is the ice just above the lake (in a zone, one gathers, of ice that plated on from the lake, so it is a lake sample), or something from the fluid lake proper.
• … is more, gotta go.

*UPDATE:

• AP – Seth Borenstein: Life in Antarctic Lake? It’s everywhere else ; Just the sort of followup story one likes to see after a news break that gave reporters little room to breathe while trying to sort out what just happened. This gives the background context and answers the question some might ask when hearing that this deep lake has been tapped: So what?

- Charlie Petit

Media that pay close attention to paleoanthropology had to jump quick today. Out of the blue yesterday a team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Leipzig opened to the public (or, at least, that tiny share that knows how to move giant BAM files around and read them) a multiply cross-checked but formally unpublished entire genome of the species of near-humans we call Denisovans. All, as we’ve read before, derived from a single finger bone.

The Denisovans (I am still unsure if that is DeNEESovans or DeniSOvans or DENisovans or..?) already have made a warm place in the hearts of those fascinated by the prehistoric adventures of humankind. Imagine running into and occasionally interbreeding with cousin hominins – Neanderthals, Hobbits of Flores Island, and Denisovans being the ones we know about, so far – and as recently as a few tens of thousands of years ago. What a strange world that was. The preliminary 2010 paper in Nature already got intense reaction in media (earlier post on discovery of the remains in Siberia’s Denisova cave, second post on interbreeding). A second paper delineating broad interpretations of the more exquisitely mapped genome is in the works and is due out in a few months. In the meantime, the team says via its leader Svante Paabo, concern that its data base ought to be put to good use by colleagues immedately (and who may be getting wrong answers by relying on the blurrier first draft) has led to its open posting on line. The details are in grist below. The idea is that if a research team wants to do a comparison of some specific allele in people or monkeys etc with its equivalent in the Denisovan genome, that’s fine. But no fair publishing an analysis of the overall genome’s implications for the deep interactions within our genus Homo until the Max Planck team publishes its upcoming opus.

This news spurt today, one must note with a tip of the hat, received something like advance notice late last month in the NYTimes, where Alanna Mitchell reported for its science section some of the conclusions already being published on the basis of the rough draft of the genome already in circulation.

For today’s news, a good place to start is at Science Magazine. At its ScienceNOW service veteran paleoanthropology writer Ann Gibbons has a calm and authoritative rendition of what’s happened. The news is simply that an ocean of data is available, but its meaning has not yet been determined. Thus, for most of the public that might avidly read and retain some results, this is news only so far as it signals that something important may eventually come of it. One avenue of research now open, Gibbons reports, is the genetic diversity in the Denisovan population. It might be inferred from comparison of the genes from the girl’s father to those from her mother. It is breathtaking, one has to say, that such a thing is possible 30,000 or more years after the coupling that left its trace in a tiny scrap of Siberian bone.

Other stories:

• Ars Technica via Wired - John Timmer: Genome of Extinct Human Relative Placed on Amazon Web Services ; A short, savvy story. The medium for this story is worth a nod. Wired, I learned from this, has an offspring called Wired Cloudline. Sponsored by IBM, it is devoted to the rising preeminance of cloud communication and computing and other modes of crowd-employment to get things done via keyboard and monitor but with little computer muscle right in front of the user. As the genome data are lofted into public in part by Amazon, and as apparently that is part of whatever the cloud stack is, Timmer’s piece at Ars Technica is posted as cloud-pertinent. And if you guessed I don’t know what I’m talking about when the topic is the cloud, you’re right. Primitive people used to think, some maybe still do, that God was in the clouds, a’la Jacob’s Ladder. Maybe, uploading our data, surrendering it to the omniscient cloud, we’re entering a modern simulacrum to that old time religion.
• New Scientist – Michael Marshall: Entire genome of extinct human reconstructed ;
• NatureNews – Katherine Rowland: Complete Denisovan genome offers glimpse of ancient variation ;
• Register (UK) Adam Smith: Ancient cave girl genome could crack Man’s genetic puzzle ; Yesterday we posted on a Register story about a Super Earth, one that had no mention of boffins. One feared the passing of an era. Nope, in this one, Mr. Smith (not the author of yesterday’s) give boffinry its regular Register salute. He also seeks to kibosh any silly expectation that the cloning of a Denisovan is at all imaginable – even if it were defensible to try it, which it isn’t.
• Daily Mail – Rob Waugh: Pointing to the past: Scientists seqeunce whole genome of ‘Denisovan’ caveman from fossilized finger bone in Siberian cave ;

Grist for the Mill: Max Planck Press Release ; Genome data ;

- Charlie Petit

This news broke Thursday afternoon and Friday. Ksjtracker skipped it  yesterday as it was getting just a little stale. But new renditions of the news just keep popping up. The news is discovery, by a UC Santa Cruz and Carnegie Institution research team (plus co-authors all over), that a triple star system just 22 light years away has a so-called Super Earth planet with a mass estimated to be at least 4.5 times that of the real Earth. It orbits one of the triplet’s members, a red dwarf star, every 28 days (our days, natch) so it better be close to its bitty little sun to whip around that fast. The giveaway was a wobble in the star’s position, as measured by doppler shift. Red dwarfs, or M-stars, are pretty dim. Upshot: If it has a rocky surface and water, the radiation from the star ought to permit liquid water.

Another reason to post on this is because your tracker is ticked off. Some reports – including a television one I watched last night but now can’t find – say the world is at least 4.5 times bigger than Earth. “Bigger” is ambiguous – we talking radius, or volume? A big guy and a skinny guy may be equally tall. But the number is a mass ratio so no sense saying something like “bigger.” The TV show unambiguated the term exactly backwards: with a graphic showing Earth and, to scale, another planet 4.5 times as wide. It looked gigantic, far beyond super, around the size of Neptune. Gad. Such innumeracy is infuriating. Mass, as I am confident nearly every reader of this blog knows, is mostly a function of volume and of course density. Volume of a sphere goes up by the cube of radius. So if the mass is 4.5 times more, and assuming density is about the same, one takes the cube root of the mass ratio to get a diameter multiplier of 1.65. Bigger, but not monstrously. Sheesh.

Sample stories:

• Forbes – Alex Knapp: Astronomers Identify Another Possibly Habitable Planet ; Ah, droll sarcasm, as Knapp notes the star “has the very poetic name GJ 667C.”
• Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts: Planet found at perfect spot for life – in solar system with three suns;
• SF Chronicle – David Perlman: ‘Super-Earth’ planet spurs hope for billions more ;
• Time Magazine – Michael D. Lemonick: New Planet Found: Could a Super-Earth plus Triple Stars Equal Life? ; Interesting sidelight – astronomer Steve Vogt’s surmise that it’d take about 220 years to get a spacecraft there and radio back a closeup picture. One also has to add the time need to invent a space drive able to get the robot up to one tenth light speed on the way and then slow down enough to go into orbit (no sense going all that way just to whiz on through). I figure more like 500 years.
• Register – Richard Chirgwin: Jackpot; astronomers tag Goldilocks planet GJ 667C is practically a next-door neighbor ; No no, GJ 667C is the star (C for #3 in the three star system. The planet is GJ 667Cc, with the c for number three planet in the star’s family). This story is a Register science story standout, perhaps a new era? : no mention of  boffins! Old guard Lewis Page and Lester Haines never missed a chance to anoint boffins.
• Space.com – Denise Chow: Newfound super-Earth might support life, scientists say ;

Why it is announced now is not obvious. It’s due out in Astrophysical Journal Letters. At the time of the release it was not even yet up on the arXiv astro-ph server (it is now, in grist below). While I’d not be surprised to see press officers have already begun timing publicity to arXiv postings, this is the first I have noticed.

Grist for the Mill: UCSC Press Release, Astro-ph Paper ; Carnegie Institution of Science Press Release ;

 - Charlie Petit

East span, Bay Bridge ; Newlands&Co www.nc3d.com/

First, it took forever to get started on this post. Upon reading Henry Fountain‘s feature story on the building of a new, quake-tolerant east span of the San Francisco Bay Bridge - in print, it takes the entire first page before jumping inside – the embedded on line video of the bridge swaying and undulating in a simulated earthquake led me to look at the credit. That led  to an architectural rendering service in Portland, Newlands & Co. That led to a long click-through of its portfolios and videos. It’s one thing to know full well in principle that practical animation and simulation is widely done at a high level. It’s quite another to discover how engrossing it is. Now I know how CA’s high speed rail system will appear if it ever gets done.

Oh yes, Fountain’s story is one not to be judged impartially by one who can see the bridge coming together from the front yard (binoculars help). I learned a great deal, more than I have from any single spread in the SF Chronicle. And the animation of it, from the people at Newlands, tolerating an earthquake and showing how the various pieces of sliding pipes and sacrificial crumple steel works is encouraging. Not much science, but like stories on deep sea oil rigs and space stations, this tale of big engineering wouldn’t easily fit anywhere else.

Other headlines of note:

• Matthew L. Wald: Radioisotope Recipe Lacks One Ingredient: Cash ; An instructive story and difficult to write, one imagines. The theme is simple: making some, vital medical radioisotopes has traditionally piggy-backed on reactors used mainly for nuclear weapons fuel production. The story is about technetium-99, and I happen to have had a heart scan that relied on some of this stuff (the ticker’s just fine – a mere low-grade heart block). It’s costly to have its manufacture the main point of one’s business. Solutions are at hand. But jamming in all the howevers and alternatives turns the tale into a list of possible ways to maintain their supply. It runs together into word stew. One bets Wald had a tough time composing this in a fashion that is both useful, and compelling enough to read to the end. It’s a common problem – a story’s not worth a lot of space but is devilishly hard to tell briefly to useful effect.
• David Tuller: Fallout From Fatigue Syndrome Retraction Is Wide ; Another tough one to write. The idea that chronic fatigue is due to a virus, rather than mood disorder or something else in the brain, is attractive. Tuller treads carefully, laying out the recent discouraging news that a key study has been retracted without writing anything to get patient advocates and activists into the mood to throw bricks. Experts mostly agree, he writes, that some infectious agent or other environmental factors probably lies behind it. But science has not yet been able to pin it down.
• Carl Zimmer: From Inside Lions and Leviathans, Anatomist Builds a Following ; It’s about a TV show, and a New York anatomist who got suddenly famous, and most important about the insides of beasts including whales. Don’t miss the video clip, and the instructions on how to open a whale.

As usual, lots more. Whole Section;

-Charlie Petit

North of the Tibetan plateau is another rugged place, the Altai (or Altay) Mountains where China, Russia, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan come together. Pretty wild place. Mountains 12,000 feet high in places.  Back in late January the University of Pennsylvania, prompted by a paper co-authored some of its researchers put in the American Journal of Human Genetics, declared that it may have been the ancestral homeland of some, maybe most, of the peoples who eventually crossed over the Bering Land Bridge to North America. The New World’s ‘Indians’ may have journeyed, many generations ago, from a place over the hump from the real India.

It’s not the first media story on the topic, but one just posted at National Geographic‘s news service by Christine Dell’Amore was first to hit the tracker’s radar. It must be great to write about remote place for NG’s news service. Yell out “hey I need a picture of the Altay Mountains” and darned if the place has one on file taken for it (here’s another, even better one, by the same shooter). Those fellows are Kazakh hunters who use eagles as their assistants. Certain genetic traits, or alleles, shared by many native Americans appear to be shared with some people in the Altai.

Dell’Amore’s story has a caveat, via a somewhat skeptical source, to counter any suggestion that an Altai community, a ‘founder population,’ up and paraded more or less intact, on a journey perhaps taking generations, to North America and begat everybody from Athabascans to Zunis. One has to assume that gene-mixing from groups across of large swath of Asia must surely also have left its borad-based signature in native Americans. Altai may have held some ancestors to the first Americans. Other of their genes surely arrived here without going first through these mountains.

A few other outlets ran the news already:

• Philadelphia Inquirer (Jan 30)  Faye Flam: Penn research finds genetic link between Native Americans, Russian Region ;
  
• TG Daily (Jan. 27) Kate Taylor: Native Americans traced to Siberian mountains ; Makes no effort to acknowledge that Native Americans may have an ancestry with a large footprint across more than the Altai range.
• Medill Reports (Graduate Journalism School, Nrthwestern U, Jan 27) Gloria Oh : Genetic link between Native Americans and Asians strengthened ;
• Daily Mail (UK, Jan 26) Rob Waugh: Native Americans actually came from a tiny mountain region in Siberia, DNA research reveals ; Sigh. Actually, huh? All of’em. Just marched on over. Didn’t marry or dally with or grab  or get grabbed by anybody from other groups on the way. Actually.
• Voice of Russia (Feb 2)  Elena Kovachich: Immigrants to America from Siberia ;

None of the stories captures what seems to be a potential, epic sweep to this news. The peopling of North America is a grand story, yet untold, most likely never to be reconstructed from prehistory in its entirety. These news stories, while all right as rewrites and other reactions to a press release, don’t get the job done. First is the question of how much of the North American native, collective genome is traceable to such a small region in Asia. A few distinctive X and Y chromosome-associated alleles may be from Altai, but are others equally traceable to specific traditional populations elsewhere? My family name is Petit, there are Petits aplenty in California, Oregon, and a few other places in the US. France may be the ancestral homeland of the name, but not of most of our genome. That’s all over Europe, but more UK than France.

   Second, it could be interesting to call around among Native American historians and leaders. Some members of Washington’s Umatilla tribe, living along the Columbia River, reacted with great offense during the Kennewick Man affair to any suggestion their ancestors came from Asia. Their stories said they arose right where they still are. Hmmpphhht. Respect for tradition and culture is a fine thing. One ought to learn the old stories. But one wonders how widespread, among those working to maintain a rich cultural continuity of today’s tribes to their ancestors, is the idea that the old cosmologies and lore have merit only when taken as historic truth. Could be an interesting angle to pursue.   

Grist for the Mill: Penn Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

It seems an eternity since stories began emerging from East Antarctica that there are not only lakes under its immense icecap, but that Russian researchers are drilling down more than two miles to the biggest one, Lake Vostok, from its research station of the same name. The Soviet Union built Vostok Station, at the so-called Pole of Cold or Pole of Inaccessibility that is farthest from the Southern Ocean and more than 11,000 feet above sea level.  (as opposed to the planet’s spin-axis South Pole) in the Int’l Geophysical Year, 1957. That was before anybody even knew it sat far above a gigantic lake. It is 13,000 feet under the ice. Right, the lake is below sea level. Weird. The ice cap has warped the continent’s rocky craton down that far.

But you want weird, there’s more….

YIKES!!! They did it. Maybe. This post now pivots. News moves fast. The BBC had hardly filed a story - which got me started this morning – on the Russian drive to get to Lake Vostok before anybody else got to a similar if smaller lake  when, as I sat lethargically moseying via Bing and Google etc. they lit up with new sorta news:

• Ria Novosti: Scientists Drill to Sub-Glacial Antarctic Lake: No byline, filed from St. Petersburg, and after a strong if not very informative start asserting without equivocation that an unnamed source says the lake has been reached by the drillers “to reveal the secrets” it has kept for 20 million years, it veers into cloud cuckoo land. It’s quite amazing how it does so with hardly a transition. This story entertains the tale, with a straight face, that shortly after the end of WWII a German submarine somehow or other drove into Lake Vostok and there hid Hitler’s secret files and perhaps even his and Eva Braun’s remains for eventual cloning. Such an enterprising news writing strategy – scientific adventure and crazy talk, all in one package.
• The View (Russia) Russian scientists have drilled a  4-kilometer ice in Antractica ; Cites Ria Novosti as its source for the announcement. But no Hitler or Eva Braun.
• RT (Russ.) ‘Lost World’ reached: 20 million yr old Antarctic lake ‘drilled’ ; Again, Ria Novosti get top billing for breaking the news and remaining its primary source.
• Fox News: Russian scientists reach buried Antarctic Lake Vostok ; Hmm. No byline here, either. And it cites as its primary source, yep, Ria Novosti, which has an account which as we’ve just seen has an apparently loose association with reality.

Hmmm. What the hell is going on? We turn to  another crucible of truth (a place where plain facts, being so dull, get melted down and recast in fabulous fashion and always with superb pictures).

• Daily Mail (UK) Rob Cooper, Thomas Durante: We know where they are! Antarctic explorers says Russian scientists are safe but still ‘working round the clock’ as polar winter looms . Antarctic summer will come to an end within days – team’s last chance to leave the station ; And that hed sampling includes only one of four bullets in the dek. It does seem that a puzzling loss of radio contact from Vostok Station has occurred. This, the Daily Mail’s correspondents assure readers, “has chilling echoes of classic horror film The Thing, where scientists dig up a buried spacecraft in the Antarctic ice, only to unleash an extraterrestrial horror within.” That’s just dumb. Everybody knows that the classic, ie first, version of the movie with James Arness as the giant alien carrot was set in the Arctic. This story on line does, however, display the Mail’s usual, keen sense for illustration.

Just when things are getting fun, time to check with some outlets that still hobble their news writing by resorting to that boring old bromide: When in doubt, check it out. And always be in doubt.

•  CBC Quirks and Quarks – Bob McDonald: Touching the oldest water on Earth ; Filed a few days ago, nothing on actual penetration of the lake, yet.
• Wired (UK) : Russian Drill Penetrates 14-Million-Year-Old Antarctic Lake ; This is getting peculiar. This hed is a new topper on a sane account on the Russian drill program with nothing about radio blackouts or other eery events – but it does has a little italic update on top saying Ria Novosti says the drill is now in the lake proper.

I’ll keep my eyes open for responsible and believable reporting on the Vostok drilling program. Is the string’s business end in the lake or not. Was there a radio blackout. How urgent is it that the team pack up and get out before it gets even colder down there. And finally, if the Russians were about to break through, wouldn’t it be nice if they’d flown in a real journalist or two to report from the scene?

*UPDATES:

• Our Amazing Planet/LiveScience – Andrea Mustain: Russian Team Has Reached Buried Antarctic Lake, Reports Say ; A careful job of relaying Ria Novosti’s substance, with all the tabloid nonsense defused – and explicit declaration by outside experts that they’ve heard nothing official from authorities in Russia on the Vostok drilling program’s status. Last week Mustain filed a scene-setter: Russian Scientists Poised to Reach Ice-Buried Antarctic Lake ;

– Charlie Petit

The Hubble Space Telescope’s userers at the European Space Agency, which is a junior partner to NASA on the telescopes management, released today a stunning image of a galaxy called NGC 1073. If Milky Way specialists are right, it looks a lot like the one in which the Sun and its planets circulate. The distant galaxy is hardly new to science, having been discovered by German-English telescope wizrd William Herschel in 1785. To the left and down a tad is a more conventional image of it in a catalog assembled in the mid-1990s. What is now is not only the details that Hubble captured, but recent reconstructions of how our Milky Way would look to outsiders. Piecing that together is no trivial task, what with us being buried inside it with no good view of what is where, especially on the other side of the central bulge that pretty much blocks out view at most wavelengths. But the latest reconstructions indicate we are not, as usually has been declared, in a classicspiral galaxy, but a barred spirral with a distincting band of stars crossing its core and to which some of the spiral arms find anchor.

Several outlets, most of them specialty ones with a focus on space, but including some large popular media, picked up the story:

•  BBC – Hubble snaps stunning barred spiral galaxy image ; Not much more than a fat caption for the pretty picture.
• Space.com: Hubble telescope captures Milky Way galaxy’s twin ;
• Daily Mail – Rob Waugh: The bar at the centre of the galaxy: Hubble captures sharp picture of ‘barred spiral’ galaxy just like our own Milky Way ;
• Universe Today – Nancy Atkinson: Hubble Captures a Classic Barred Galaxy ;

Grist for the Mill: ESA Press Release ;

THE REAL REASON FOR THIS POST…

   Another press release, in grist below and from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, or Hubble central, caught my eye first this morning. Hunting for news on it led to the bunch of stories above. But  this seems far more interesting, if less gorgeous as wall-art. It relates discovery of the brightest magnified galaxy yet, with the magnifying glass being not the telescope, but an intervening cluster of galaxies. The lensing mass is not so far away, by cosmological yardsticks, but it has bent the light from a far more distant galaxy behind it in a way that gives us here on Earth a dreadfully distorted but magnified view of it. It is 10 billion light years away or so. It looks in the sky like a set of curved, blue filaments spread across a vast distance – an optical illusion. If we looked straight at it, it would be a faint fuzzball barely visible.But although smeared out, the lensed image gives a bright view of a galaxy a long time ago, when star forming was underway at a furious pace. I don’t know why the arcs are blue, by the way. Maybe the redshift carried strong ultraviolet into the blue part of the spectrum?

I find these gravity lenses fascinating, in large part because in 1987 at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena astronomers from Stanford and Kitt Peak unveiled pictures of just such arcs in the sky. Telescopes had not revealed them before with such clarity. The experts wondered what they are. One ida: monster shock waves plowing intergalactic gas into a thickness to spawn stars. My story for the SF Chronicle carried the headline, “Biggest Objects in the Universe . Scientists find Them Stupefying.” Maybe somebody at the meeting who really knew their physics suspected they were actually rather small galaxies magnified by nature’s ultimate telescopes, but none such showed up at the press conference. It was not long, however, before lensing was appreciated and the arcs got the nickname “Einstein rings.” There are are science writer in the biz now who were hardly born in 1987,  but to me it was not so long ago. How fast things change.

Stories:

• Universe Today – Tammy Plotner: Hubble Captures Giant Lensed Galaxy Arc ; Great additional illus, showing how the actual distant galaxy got deconvolved to reconstruct, roughly, its actual shape 10 billion years ago.

Grist for the Mill:

• Hubble Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit