Here is something I did not know for sure and I’ll bet most tracker readers didn’t either, not that one is expected to stop often and wonder about such things. Of all the practical units for everyday life (dimension, time, mass mainly), only one’s definition depends on some physical object or commonly observed phenomenon such as how long it takes for the Earth to turn on its axis. That latter one of course, was too sloppy. Only mass – specifically, the kilogram – remains dependent on such an easy-to-see example. More surprising is how hard it is to pin it to some fundamental, reproducible physics. A meter, for instance, no longer needs to be checked against a standard metal rod of composition that doesn’t shrink or expand much with temperature. A meter was re-defined as a specific number of wavelengths of a narrow, krypton-86 atomic emission line, which in turn was later updated to how far light in a vacuum travels in a teensy, precisely declared time interval.

But the kilogram is that thing in the photo. The cylinder of iridium-platinum alloy inside three nested bell jars is in a vault in Paris, taken out only once in a long while to get polished and checked against copies  kept in few other centers of science and industry. One problem is that it is not constant, what with atoms of metallic alloys prone to wander off no matter how careful one is.

All this in a feature article in a more commonly technical journal.

• IEEE Spectrum – Rachel Courtland: The Kilogram, Reinvented ; Where one learns a concerted effort is underway to get a definition that one could, say, radiogram to alpha centauri’s ETI’s and they could make their kilogram exactly like ours without visiting Paris. Never heard of a Watt balance before? Courtland assures us that it “links mass to quantum-electrical measurement” and that it might be the basis for a new definition. I didn’t quite get it, but did learn that Canada has a good one. Others propose to exactly count the atoms in hunks of, say, silicon of high istopic purity and decree exactly how many make a kilogram (or more handy small exact fraction of one).

Nifty yarn. The process to redefine the kilogram, it says here, is deeply underway. That’s news that’d be of keen enough interest to enough readers out there to merit a circulation in lay media.

- Charlie Petit

A chemist and energy researcher at MIT, Daniel Nocera,  has gotten a lot of attention in recent years for what he calls the artificial leaf. It does appear rather clever and perhaps a door toward a historical shift in how mankind powers civilization. Envisioned is a system of simple solar collectors that, placed in water, harness the energy in sunlight to split, right there, H2O into bubbling streams of hydrogen and oxygen. One can store the hydrogen as fuel that, at night, could run turbines or other engines and make electricity.

This week a special “Innovation” edition of the New Yorker arrived in the mail. It has at least two articles of particular interest to the demographic that KSJTracker serves. One, by Michael Specter, looks hard at geo-engineering, or what former Science magazine writer Eli Kintisch has called hacking the planet. It’s a good and cautionary read. But my interest for the moment is in the one by David Owen on Nocera and his artificial leaf. If you’re not a subscriber you may have a hard time reading the whole thing online without ponying up a fee.

What the article does best is, along with its personal and historic detail, tell readers that Nocera’s aim is not, as some of us (me) have been led to believe during casual encounter with news on this at other outlets, to provide a major new power source for heavily industrialized nations’ manufacturing centers or to other people who like their kilowatts in bulk. Those uses benefit people already heavily powered up. Nocera is aiming lower, also means higher. He imagines this technology as transformational mainly for people who struggle to have any power at all. That includes those in shanty towns or out in the bush far from the grid, and for whom having a simple, sturdy way to make enough power to run a light bulb all night or to keep cell phones and other comm devices charged would be life-changing.

What it should have done is put much higher that Nocera is developing a reputation for excess enthusiasm and lapses into exaggeration. “Showmanship” comes up. One finds this nice bit of phrasing: his prototupe (see pic above) is “a prop, not a product.” This is nowhere near saying he has a scam running. That’s clearly not the case. But Owen tells us that despite the fervor of the team building these little electronic water-splitting marvels, they are still short of the efficiency and compactness that one needs even to run a decent light bulb all night on the energy harvested during the day. It’s better up front to tell people to take what they are about to read with a grain of salt.

The article also adds to the tremendous amount of media attention, by specialty outlets for the most part, that Nocera and his group have enjoyed. The best New Yorker stories tend to tell us things we didn’t know a thing about.  We’ve posted on this possibly epochal development in photosynthesis here at ksjtracker (in March last year). The news flow has continued.

Other Stories on the Artificial Leaf:

• PC World – David Saetang (Mar 29, 2011) Researchers Develop Artificial Leaf; Your Marigolds Cower in Fear ;
• NYTimes (Business, Mar 21, 2011) Anne Eisenberg: The Answer Is (Artifically) Blowing in the Wind ; Where we learn the name of the (famous) Caltech chemist to whom Owen refers in passing.
• Economic Times (April 1 2012, India) Hari Pulakkat: Artificial photosynthesis: Make your own fuel and change the world ;

Grist for the Mill: American Chemical Society Press Release ;

Tomorrow we’ll wrap up what media have to say about what NASA’s science team thinks of  Vesta, the asteroid around which NASA’s itinerant spacecraft  Dawn has been slowly circling for nearly a year. Vesta is a big rock and, so the experts are whispering within earshot of reporters, an unusually well-preserved one. It also is historic, having been the fourth object discovered (1807)  in what we now call the asteroid belt. It is roughly spherical, about 300 miles across depending on where one measures it.  It seems to have formed during the first stages of our solar system’s birth and not gotten blasted to smithereens and re-congealed from debris like a lot of other large asteroids. It seems to have a once-molten iron core. It’s a planetesimal pretty much intact, an emissary from the past and all that. It’s like a miniature, rocky planet.

Ceres, first asteroid known (1801) and toward which Dawn will shove off on its xenon solar-powered ion whisper jet in two months for a similar inspection, looks to be a classic outer solar system chunk, full of ice. The probe won’t reach Ceres until Feb 2015. Being ionic makes Dawn  laconic.

Several outlets moved stories in advance of today’s news conference (2 p.m. Eastern, 11 a.m. Pacific) that whet the Vestal appetite.

Vesta News Curtain Raisers:

• Space.com: NASA to Reveal New Vesta Discoveries by Asteroid Probe Thursday ;
• Universe Today -Jason Major: The Bright and Dark Side of Vesta’s Craters ; Mr. Major tells us up front that he himself took NASA’s pictures and sewed them together, twiddled with the contrast and mid-range boost and all that other digital imagery stuff, to come up with a custom illus. That shows initiative. The tagline explains that he is a graphic designer. He just couldn’t help tweaking the raw press material.
• UniverseToday – Nancy Atkinson: Dawn Reveals More of Vesta’s Secrets ; This filed two weeks ago. Makes one wonder what more NASA will have to say later today.
• Spaceflight Now – Stephen Clark: Scientists use Dawn to pull back the veil on Vesta.

Grist for the Mill: NASA Press Conference Announcement, NASA Dawn Mission;

3D special: If you have some red and blue 3D glasses (EVERY science writer should have a pair at the desk), here are some Vesta photos and vids with real perspective. If you like that, try another example of  what space science has brought back to Earth in 3D: here is our Moon’s Tycho crater in a fly-by recreation, built up from imagery by Japan’s Kaguya spacecraft. Another  good one: A perfect crater as presented by NASA’s lunar reconnaissance orbiter.

Artist view of Gliese 581 from planet

Here’s a daily news story that has a singular reason to exist. A writer decided to go to a meeting. He found no other press there. He learned something very interesting – at least, to the community of readers who avidly follow every twist and turn of the hunt for alien Earths, including Super Earths, and the long grind toward the day we might be able to analyze them for signs of life (or its signals, saying hello). And he got it into the journalism section of a major journal.

• NatureNews – Richard (Rick) Lovett: Tidal heating shrinks the ‘goldilocks’ zone ;

For that crowd who follows such news as this, what is the first thing, quick, that the moon Io evokes? I bet it’s volcanoes. That mini-world is the most volcanic thing in the solar system. Its orbit of Jupiter is not quite circular, so it cannot match its rotation rate with its orbital period except on average. Sometimes it’s a little fast, sometimes a little slow, nodding its face at Jove while the latter’s tidal forces regularly squeeze the thing out-of-round on a shifting axis. The friction keeps its melt zone hopping and bubbling.

Lovett, at a little specialty astrodynamics meeting in Oregon, heard a University of Washington astrobiologist describe how similar processes could be heating to unliveable levels a large share of a recently-speculated huge repository for Earthlike planets: the billions of tiny red dwarf stars in the Milky Way and probably nearly every other galaxy. He and colleagues calculate that to be warm enough to be in the zone where liquid water can exist requires a world be close to a red dwarf. There, tidal forces are fairly high. It takes only slight ellipticity for a planet, even a tidally-locked one, to undergo the kind of kneading that Io feels. Ergo, gushers of lava everywhere.

This is no reason to despair about SETI finding paydirt near an M-dwarf. But it may cut chances by half or more. But with, as we say, billions of them out there it would seem some ought to be potential habitats anyway. Or, as Lovett puts things gracefully, there may yet be, around red dwarfs, “a menagerie of previously undreamt-of planets.” And for stars with greater than about one fourth the mass of our Sun, the tidal, volcanic hell effect fades away from the habitable zone.

Looking around I found a recent story on the general topic that came oh-so-close to describing the problem:

• Space.com – Nola Taylor Redd (April 27): Odds of Finding Alien Life Boosted by Billions of Habitable Worlds ; The story explicitly mentions tidal locking. But Redd’s sources addressed only one difficulty for life on a world with one face toward its star: near side very hot, far side very cold. Those sources tell her perhaps winds or other factors might spread the heat around in a comfy manner. Nobody, apparently, thought of Io’s object lesson.

*UPDATE (Dept of no scoop like an old scoop) See comments, or looky here:

• Astrobiology Magazine (Feb 9) Charles Q. Choi: Tidal Forces Could Squeeze Out Planetary Water ;

- Charlie Petit

If you’ve heard that genetically modified crops in India have hurled a lot of poor farmers into such debt and despair that they are killing themselves by the thousands, I just read a well-reasoned corrective. A blogger and iconocalstic media critic has gathered up examples of where that line of thinking has taken hold and how it came to be. Recommended reading. As he writes, tragedies in agriculture in India of exactly this sort must surely happen but it’s no easy task to sort through it all.

• Collide-a-Scape – Keith Kloor: How Seeds of a False Story Took Root and Spread ;

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- Charlie Petit

Y’know, don’t you, that strain of climate contrarian humor that evokes SUVs so often?  Maybe some scientists or other science-interested person makes note of the greenhouse effect on Venus, or during the Eemian or during the early Earth and dim Sun days. In a blink somebody hoots, hah! Tell it to Al Gore! Did they have SUVs back then or what!? Perhaps a few of them do so while looking proudly at giant Lexus GXs or Lincoln Navigators in the drive. Such things are superb vehicles, of a type that America invented and good for us. If  you have a family and a horse trailer to haul and frequent need to get off the pavement, saddle-up. But they do look sort of stupid picking up one or two kids every day with their big motors idling in the line to get to the pick-up zone and the AC full-on or performing similar routine chores. Fact is, one doesn’t see so many of the huge ones anymore. Maybe that’s what the post-Cretaceous mammals asked after shaking off the comet dust. You seen any of those big things lately?

This week brought up another global warming gas news event that invites giggles, especially from headline writers. The news, in a letter that researchers in England and Scotland have in this week’s Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, has a title that says it all:  Could methane produced by sauropod dinosaurs have helped drive Mesozoic climate warmth? Good question, and that doesn’t even count the hadrosaurs (duck bills), ceratopsians, and a bunch of other dinos that ate plants and presumably ate and erupted swampy vapors all their live long days.  The answer to the title is yes, probably.  The authors calculated biomass from published density estimates (an astounding dozen or so long-necked monsters per square km, or around 30 per square mile) times habitat area and so on and so forth, corrected  for guesswork on how their methano-matabolisms compared to modern mammal herbivores, and bingo – about as much gas as from all the modern world’s herds of livestock. Maybe more. And cows and things are presumed to drive a minor but not unimportant share of contemporary warming. It’s of some interest that their letter closes with a thank you to the late Lynn Margulis “for infecting us with her microbial enthusiasm.” That doesn’t fit easily in news stories. But farts do.

Stories.

• AP – Seth Borenstein: Excuse Me: Gassy dinosaurs helped warm Earth; His lede: Potty humor just got prehistoric.
• Reuters – Deborah Zabarenko: It’s a gas: dinosaur flatulence may have warmed Earth ;
• Ars Technica – John Timmer: Belching dinosaurs may have helped keep their world warm ; Here’s some good-natured writing for you. Timmer makes no fart jokes. But he does remark parenthetically to the journal editors, “I’m not sure that the Jurassic really qualifies as “current.”
• The Independent – John Von Radowitz: Dinosaur wind ‘altered climate’ ;
• National Geographic – Charles Choi: Dinosaurs’ Gaseous Emissions Warmed Earth?
• MSNBC Cosmic Log – Alan Boyle: Buuurp! Methane-emitting dinosaurs could have warmed the earth. Where we learn that one of the authors is agnostic on a burning question. He told Boyle, “We have no particular view which end of the sauropod the methane came out. Could be either or both.” With livestock, Boyle helpfull tells readers, it’s mostly via belch.
• Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts: Did dinosaur ‘emissions’ help warm the prehistoric climate? ;
• NewsCore (News Corps’s agency_: Dinosaurs farted their way to extinction – scientists ; Nothing in the letter to the journal has anything about dinos cooked in their own gas. The story doesn’t back it up either. Fox News ran this thing, natch under an even less ambiguous hed: Dinosaurs ‘gassed’ themselves into extinction, British scientists say. It even says here that, until now, scientists had blamed asteroids or volcanoes. Right. Burps and flatulence are now the lead theory? Once those fart jokes and whoopie cushions start going around some people, including in news rooms, can’t get their minds straight for hours.
• Slate: Dinosaur Flatulence Dutch-Ovened the Jurassic Period ; First, the paper includes spuculation about the Cretaceous too. Second, this closing laff line at Slate, where wit is highly prized, don’t got rhythm: “While this new research may not shed light on the “denied it, supplied it” or “smelt it, dealt it” theories, it does suggest that living during the time of the dinosaurs would have totally stunk.” Stinkeroo indeed.
• BBC – Ella Davies: Dinosaur gases ‘warmed the Earth’ ;

Perhaps I’m wrong, but no reporter appears to have had the gumption to call around and ask just what percentage of global warming today can be put on farm animals, meaning domesticated herbivore methanogenesis.  Is it five percent? What? LATE AMENDMENT: Seth B. saw this post, and answers thus:

Gavin Schmidt at NASA calculated that the  2 ppm of methane from dino farts would have contributed about .4 watts per meter squared (forcing), which means about 0.3 degrees C (.54 degrees F);  and the study authors put current cow farts at 1/5 of dino belchings, so by extrapolation you’re looking at about a tenth of a degree F.

*Backdate UPDATE!  A jolly and longtime science journalist who now handles science news for the University of Utah heard a bell clang in his head when he read this news.  Thus we present:

• AP (Oct. 23, 1991) Lee Siegel: Dung shows dinosaurs produced Earth-warming gas ; Where one also reads that a skeptic from Penn State figured there’s little chance there could have been enough dinosaurs to change things (skeptic, when it comes to greenhouse gases, meant something more legit in those days). The story has most of the elements one sees in the recent news. One notices with disappointment that the new paper at Current Biology does not include in its footnotes a citation of this late 20th century during the Holocene (before proclamation of the Anthropocene in many quarters) research into dinosaur dung and methanogenesis.

Grist for the Mill: Current Biology Letter ; Cell Press Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Chicago Tribune launched its four-part series on the science and pseudoscience of flame retardants on Sunday and it’s a superb example of investigative science journalism. I say that even though the last story in Playing With Fire won’t be published until tomorrow.

Let me start by quoting from the first piece by Patricia Callahan and Sam Roe:

Dr. David Heimbach knows how to tell a story.

Before California lawmakers last year, the noted burn surgeon drew gasps from the crowd as he described a 7-week-old baby girl who was burned in a fire started by a candle while she lay on a pillow that lacked flame retardant chemicals.

“Now this is a tiny little person, no bigger than my Italian greyhound at home,” said Heimbach, gesturing to approximate the baby’s size. “Half of her body was severely burned. She ultimately died after about three weeks of pain and misery in the hospital.”

Heimbach’s passionate testimony about the baby’s death made the long-term health concerns about flame retardants voiced by doctors, environmentalists and even firefighters sound abstract and petty.

But there was a problem with his testimony: It wasn’t true.

This vividly written opening sets up the greater point of the series – that the chemical industry has conducted a decades long campaign to persuade consumers, regulators and other manufacturers that fire retardant chemicals work (despite much evidence to the contrary) and are safe (despite even greater evidence to the contrary.) Testimony and publications by industry paid scientists such as Heimbach are central to the success of the campaign, according to the Tribune reporters who based the stories on hundreds of documents.

The series also makes a fascinating connection to the role of the tobacco companies in instigating the campaign as part of a plan to draw attention away from the role of cigarettes in starting fires.  That link reminds me of the work of science historian Naomi Oreskes, of the University of California-San Diego, and her book Merchants of Doubt, which neatly connects scientists working for the tobacco industry with those working to discredit the idea of global climate change.

Day Two of the series looks at the way the chemical industry manipulated fire officials into supporting their cause. And today’s piece, “Distorting Science” takes a closer look at the deceptive use of research and the dismayingly complicit role of industry scientists.  Tomorrow’s story will focus on lackluster regulators who “have allowed generation after generation of flame retardants onto the market without thoroughly assessing health risks.” All the stories can be accessed through this link.

And you should access them. They provide one of the best (albeit depressing) looks at the way industry manipulates our understanding of scientific research – and the way that our government follows that lead.

— Deborah Blum

One thinks the comment files at the NYTimes are better moderated than at most newspapers that run such things. Today’s science section leader, from Donald G. McNeil, Jr., is a lengthy examination of the low AIDS and HIV rates in Cuba and the sturdy, and occasionally Draconian in the early years of the  epidemic, measures that the authoritarian state has adopted to keep them that way. The piece is a paean to something that for years Cuba has been known for, it’s free health care and its aggressive foreign policy of sending doctors to other countries to provide yet more care to the poor.

Considering the vitriol that usually follows any news story that can be taken in any way as soft on Castro, the Times’s long comment list appears pruned to keep the ravers at bay. But you go along and read deep into the lineup and the spectrum of opinion comes through. As for McNeil’s story, it is solid and, if you’ve been paying even the slightest attention to Cuba’s health system in the last 20 years, no surprise. But the details are engrossing. The piece does not sugar coat Castro’s overall legacy, but it does show that even brutal dictators can do a few things okay. Trains running on time, anyone? With it is a sidebar on what’s become of the notorious, locked sanitariums that the regime erected years ago to quarantine people with HIV.

Other headlines to note:

• Laura Beil: Herd’s Fate Lies in Preservation Clash ; One asks. If you think the animal lovers are tough when it comes to little things like rounding up resident Canada Geese off the public parks and beaches, just try interfering with the wild horses of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. They have local advocates with passion and muscle. Even if they are becoming, in places, inbred to the point of possible population crash, managing them is a political minefield.
• Sindya N. Bhanoo: Island’s Genetic Quirk: Dark Skin, Blond Hair ; From the Solomon Islands an explanation for fair hair among the traditional inhabitants and it’s not because a few northern European visitors left their marks. This news stems from a report in Science of Melanesian islanders among whom melanin-challenged hair is common. It got quite a bit of circulation already in other news agencies.
• Jane Brody: Infinite Itch: Learning to Live With Hives ; The Times’s prolific, near-genius health writer describes here a common illness I have never seen as so distinctive – the rashes that madden and have no easy explanation. Speaking of Ms. Brody, how come the picture gallery of NYT’s science reporters, 21 in all, does not include her? And Ms. Bhanoo is not there either. Probably others missing. A mystery. Maybe they opt out – the list format  (see Whole Section entry at bottom) includes email addresses.
• John Noble Wilford: Huge Asteroid Is Still the Central Villain in Dinosaur’s Extinction ; This one brings to mind the wonderful headline, Saturday Night Live version, many years ago after a series of near-death reports on a late dictator: “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is Still Dead.” Chevy Chase had nothing to do with this one. I read anything Wilford writes. There is a little of the shaggy dog to ths story. The issue is real: was the asteroid the coup de grâce for a doomed clade, or were dinos likely otherwise to have persisted until …. maybe now? Answer: After deep study of changing diversity patterns in fossils over time a research teams says it can’t tell. Still.

As usual, lots more. Whole Section ;

- Charlie Petit

Kearsarge Pass - tinyurl.com/7mkdnd4

Whoosh, lots of West Coast media stories this morning. It’s not bydesign or (conscious) bias. But it is interesting that the last of the lot (and topmost, this being a blog with most recent entries likely to be on top) is about the wall between us out here and the rest of the US growing taller.

The San Francisco Chronicle‘s David Perlman, who like everybody else at that struggling newspaper (‘struggling newspaper’ these days is nearly redundant) is under intense pressure to write purely local news and never mind that Big Bang thing or dinosaurs found somewhere else and studied by professors that don’t live around here, got a tall tale that is California to its roots. The mighty Sierra Nevada, cradle of Lake Tahoe and crowned by Mt. Whitney (14,505 feet and counting) are not only still growing but may be much younger than geologists have usually supposed. The paper ran it with an AP photo that looks like nothin’ much – a few soft hills with golden cottonwoods, and a snowy high country in the hazy distance. So I scrounged up a different one that really looks new, a vista of splintered granite and a mountain range on the make.

It’s a fine profile of how geologists figure out how old things are, how fast they are changing, and argue about new data while incorporating it and adjusting their theories as they go. Nice job – science in action.

Other stories:

• AP: Study: Sierra Nevada adds 1-2 mm elevation a year ;

Grist for the Mill: GSA Geology paper abstract ; U. Nevada-Reno Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Sac.Bee (Note logarithmic scale)

Last week the Sacramento Bee ran the first two parts of Tom Knudson‘s large package on a little-known federal agency that employs a small army of varmint killers to ease pressure on farmers and ranchers who’d far rather sell their product than to have it eaten by local wildlife. We saluted that with a double thumbs up in this post. On Sunday last Knudson finished up with Part III. It too is journalism with a heavy mallet, hitting hard and on target.

I also found I made a small error in the previous post when saying most of the victims of the USDA’s Wildlife Services are coyotes. Those are the most common four-footed targets, with more than 500,000 killed in the last decade or so. But looking at the interactive graphic – screenshot right -  that ran with the series one learns that the coyote kills are small potatoes, numerically, compared to the biggest haul during the last five years, more than 9 million European starlings. Or the five million cowbirds 2006-2011. More than three million red-winged blackbirds. And coyotes are roughly tied with rock doves, aka pigeons.

I had idly wondered last week why, with the first two parts running on a Sunday and the next Monday, the series did not finish up Tuesday. One practical reason might be that with the acreage this series takes up in newsprint only a Sunday edition could accommodate it. A better reason might be that this way Knudson could take note of the reaction to the first two parts. It is, from reading this, considerable. Part III’s theme is focussed on the future – what ought to be done to reform or perhaps eliminate the agency. He leads with a vignette on one rancher who has learned to keep his sheep safe without relying on government control officers and without killing nearly as many coyotes they’d have taken out. He reports that the most wide-open slaughter of animals that farmers and ranchers hate most is in western states, while the same agency back east has a much more tightly focussed and less environmentally disruptive mode of operation. Lots more than that. Read it. The interactive graphic, listed below, is amazing. One thing that the Wildlife Services people do exceedingly well, one ventures, is to keep solid log books and assemble statistics.

Here, lifted straight off the Bee’s website, is the full lineup. It will be a top contender in the year’s contests for writing in this genre.

• I The killing agency: Wildlife Services’ brutal methods leave a trail of animal death

• II Wildlife Services’ deadly force opens Pandora’s box of environmental problems

• III Suggestions in changing Wildlife Services range from new parctices to outright bans.

• Environmental group sues to halt killing practices of federal wildlife agency

• Videos: Target and non-target animals often suffer

• Interactive graphic: Animals killed by Wildlife Services nationwide

• Data Center: See California kills by Wildlife Services

• Full coverage of this Bee investigation

One also senses a possible factor in the series’s genesis. Knudson refers to a well-received book called Wolfer, by a former employee of the agency, that came out last year.

- Charlie Petit

The Tracker and a lot of other people missed recognizing that a recent news bump was nearly identical to an earlier one – and not all that long ago. In case you are not in the habit of trolling back through previous offering on this site looking for updates, take a look at the one appended to this post from a week ago. Briefly, not just one but two studies that dwelt upon the local temperature changes due to wind farms have blown up in media, with some on the fringes running off with them while cackling that such operations cause global warming.

- Charlie Petit

That big, daylight fireball April 22 along the California-Nevada border and subsequent discovery of a few small meteorites from its loud bang of an airburst are still reverberating in news. The Sacramento Bee has the latest from it staff writer Matt Weiser, which prompted an AP followup.

Weiser has a colorful all-around update on where things stand and the excitement not only of having a meteor overhead but then a big Zeppelin that NASA and the SETI Institute chartered to look for its leftovers. It appears he couldn’t or didn’t wrangle a free seat for the press. Too bad. It’s hardly worth being a reporter unless one gets to sit in privileged chairs and not pay a dime of one’s own for the treat.

I probably would not have posted on this except that my eye got snagged by a photo of the airship, the Eureka, based at Moffett Field on the San Francisco Peninsula and seen heading for the Sierra foothills from a Sacramento air strip. I’ve seen that airship touring around the Bay Area for a few years but it never looked orange before. It was mostly white and blue, with ads from a sponsoring insurance company, Farmers, on the side.

This morning, the darned thing flew past our front window in Berkely. White and orange as a pumpkin. I don’t know who the new corporate sponsor is going to be but it looks to be in the middle of a repaint. By the way, the airship’s operators posted some shots by a fellow out in the valley, a graphic designer named John McWade. . He got even better photos of this neutral-bouyancy behemoth as it droned on past.

We put the field glasses on the dirigible this morning. It is a stunning thing to see with its little tail propeller spinning like the windup toy submarine the grandkids used to play with in the bath. It has two more props on the side. The orange paint, one might mention, is not exactly a good look.

- Charlie Petit