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

Fred Pearce

For instance:

He has a fine and rollicking piece in The Daily Mail in the UK, under the hed “How 16 ships create as much pollution as all the cars in the world.” One might be forgiven for thinking somehow he means pollution as in all pollution as in as much CO2 and soot and and oxides of nitrogen and of sulfur and of ozone and of everything else that comes out of smokestacks and tailpipes.

But no, it’s just sulfur pollution that he means. Plus, perhaps, as the ships he describes are all huge bulk freighters run by enormous diesel engines, one might mistake “cars” for “vehicles” and thus surmise that he includes all the world’s diesel trucks in this particular competition. He does not say.

But perhaps it becomes conceivable that all the world’s cars, most of them burning gasoline or as held in the UK, petrol, and thus using fuel that tends to be exceedingly low in sulfur, are out-billowed by the plumes that rise over a mere 16 huge ships combusting sulfurous bunker fuel many times fouler than what typically comes through a hose at a filling station.

Thus, he may have compared apples to oranges here. Maybe it is no surprise that cars, by this one metric, are outdone by ships.

But even with all those cautions, the story is quite commendable. Something really ought to be done – even if the piece is true only in a narrow sense – to stiffen the fuel requirements on huge freighters and tankers.

- Charlie Petit

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

In recent days, experts have suggested that doctors should do fewer pap smears and mammograms. I’ve posted on coverage of the pap-smear story and mammography.

Laura Newman now calls my attention to an item she posted on her Urology Blog at About.com. She reports that last April, in a development that deserves new attention now, the American Urological Association recommended that doctors do less when confronted with early-stage kidney cancer. Until recently, Newman reports, many of these folks had a kidney removed, even if the cancer was confined to only a small part of the kidney. Now, the urologists recommend that doctors remove only part of the kidney, or use heat to treat the cancer, or simply watch the situation closely before deciding what to do.

That should be good news for patients, as Newman points out. But will it generate the same reaction as the suggested rollbacks in pap smear screening and mammography? Will patients worry that the new guidelines are about saving money rather than saving lives? Will they demand that their kidneys be removed even if doctors recommend otherwise?

“I think that it is going to take awhile for the American public to get used to thinking that less imaging, less screening, and less treatment in certain cases could possibly be better than more,” Newman writes.

Newman puts the recent news in the context of health care more broadly. That’s something we should all keep in mind as we continue to cover this story.

We should also think about why Americans reacted so harshly to the suggestion that some screening be reduced.

Perhaps the problem is that every aspect of medical care–every minute in a doctor’s office, every pill, every palpation–now has a dollar sign attached to it. Less care and less screening might often be better for us. And it costs less.

But does that mean we’re saving money? Or does it mean the insurance company is saving money, and we’re being shortchanged? Newman is right; we need to understand that less is more. But until Americans can be sure that health-care decisions are being made for their welfare, not for somebody else’s bottom line, they will continue to be suspicious.

Our coverage should take note of that and, without taking sides, explain as clearly as possible the scientific basis for these decisions, and the financial implications. To ignore one or the other would do our readers, listeners and viewers a disservice.

- Paul Raeburn

The data cache about 1000 emails  and 3000 documents  was hacked Thursday or so from the Climatic Research Unit of the Univ. of East Anglia.  A few have intemperate language aimed at the persistent crowd of doubters who deny that climate change is real, bad, and our fault. Like, one researcher saying he fantasizes about punching one skeptic in the face should he come across him. Another  calls the deniers idiots. Considering what the global warming deniers say right out in open about, say, Al Gore, that’s pretty mild.

And one talks of using “tricks” in data presentation to emphasize recent anthropogenic warming. Others reflect exasperation that the abating of climate warming for the last few years is not accounted for by top computer models, and other suggest that a journal editor open to papers skeptical of global warming ought to be fired. This may be seen as conspiratorial strategizing. Or, that only wildly biased cherry picking and willful ignorance in interpreting the emails could make them appear to discredit the science cited by such as IPCC.

A question is how deeply media reporters are looking into the content of the emails for themselves. So far, it appears, most are relying on the reactions of various partisans in the debate over global warming policy.

Stories:

• AP – David Stringer: Hackers leak e-mails, stoke climate debate ; One of the earlier media stories to run, after a blogstorm was well underway.
• Telegraph (UK) University of East Anglia emails: the most contentious quotes ; Indeed most contentious (see “cherry picking”) ;
• Guardian (UK) : Climate change champion and sceptic both call for inquiry into leaked emails / Both sides of climate change debate urge investigation as Met Office dismisses ’shallow attempt to descridit robust science” ; That’s a long hed – perhaps it should have been longer and called it a political debate rather than implying it’s a genuine one about the latest science. But the call for a look-see from something like the UK’s Research Integrity Office may well in order.
• The Australian – Brendan O’Keefe: Hot and bothered ; Mostly relies on sources from the camp of skeptics.
• Washington Post – Juliet Eilperin: In the trenches on climate change, hostility among foes / Stolen e-mails reveal venomous feelings toward skeptics ; She makes a nice point about the difference between substantial debate among authorities, and the public debate. Plus, she writes, the Hadley scientists and those with whom they exchange messages harbor no warm feelings for their denialist critics.
• Hey, here’s one who did go deep into the stolen trove: Guardian (UK) George Marshall: Leaked email climate smear was a PR disaster for UEA ; He read a bunch. Mostly are terribly dull and not damning to anybody’s integrity. And the seemingly damning ones were selectively trawled by “the denial industry (and a horde of climate nerds) ” to enforce their story line. And response by the Univ. of East Anglia, he writes, “was pathetic.”

There is more, but so far not much else aside from that last one seems to  reflect enterprising digging by reporters. Blogs are going nuts. Here, in the grand tradition of false balance, are two, one from each “side.”

• Real Climate – Gavin Schmidt and others: The CRU Hack plus The CRU hack: Context. ; the site generally tries to put the most contentious e-mails into the context of honest but harried scientists speaking honestly (ie, not cooking the books) to one another.
• BIGGOVERNMENT – Christopher C. Horner : Media Missing the Plot on ‘Climate Gate’: It’s the Fraud, Stupid!

And one media blog that sought a long perspective, and a scientist’s blog that separates the impact of the theft on science, and on public opinion:

• Washington Post/Capital Weather Gang – Andrew Freedman: Science historian reacts to hacked climate e-mails ;
• Climate Audit – Judy Curry: On the credibility of climate ressearch ;

Grist for the Mill: Univ. East Anglia Climatic Research Unit update ;

- Charlie Petit

The piece kicks off a series of pre-Copenhagen packages that AP plans to run in advance of the big meeting to lay plans to eventually write something for nations to, one hopes, agree to do. Its repeated theme is that back at the Earth Summit nearly 20 years ago and the subsequent writing of the largely unheeded Kyoto Protocol, the IPCC gang badly under-estimated how quickly and how hard climate change’s impacts would hit. No need to hunt up any grist for this mill – Seth puts links at the bottom of his story.

- Charlie Petit

“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

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

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

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

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

Other stories:

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

Grist for the Mill:

PLoS Genetics Collection Introduction, Links ;

NSF Press Release ;

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

- Charlie Petit

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

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

Onward. Other Stories:

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

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

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

- Charlie Petit

Did you know, for instance, that 70 years ago smelters and mills went through 200 tons of water for every ton of steel they produced, but now it’s more like three or four tons of water? It’s not a long interview butit serves to remind listeners that at last once in a while market pressures, gov’t regulations, and private innovation work well as a team.

(A nod to reader Karl Bernard for the story tip)

Grist for the Mill: Pacific Institute ;

Pic, drip irrigation, via  Business Week

- Charlie Petit