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.

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 [...]]]> 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

Aunque de poco interés para el público general, noticia importante hoy en todas las secciones de ciencia: Primer vuelo del lanzador Vega de la Agencia Espacial Europea (ESA). Pero… ¿importante por qué? Hay temas en que andamos un poco perdidos, y si no nos dan contexto, la información básica de que Europa ha lanzado un satélite de nombre Vega, [...]]]> (English intro to Spanish lang post) Lots of Spanish ink but not much variety in angles in stories on a successful first flight of Vega, the European Space Agency launcher that will allow ESA to put in orbit light satellites weighing less than 2.5 tones. Some Spanish newspapers highlight a minor local detail, that ESA is carrying a satellite built in Galicia, but don’t mention LARES, the main satellite build by Italy that will test aspects of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. One of the most comprehensive stories explaining the relevance of Vega is published in El Pais, but it is not written by a reporter but a space engineer.

Aunque de poco interés para el público general, noticia importante hoy en todas las secciones de ciencia: Primer vuelo del lanzador Vega de la Agencia Espacial Europea (ESA). Pero… ¿importante por qué? Hay temas en que andamos un poco perdidos, y si no nos dan contexto, la información básica de que Europa ha lanzado un satélite de nombre Vega, y que todo ha salido a la perfección, nos deja bastante frío. En un caso como éste, es necesario ampliar la información. Lo hace por ejemplo El País, y de una manera que nos puede hacer reflexionar: A la nota básica con información de agencias “Europa lanza su nuevo cohete Vega” EP, le debemos añadir la buena nota días atrás de Malén Ruíz de Elvira “Europa estrena otro cohete” avanzándose al resto de informaciones desde Kourou en la Guayana Francesa, y describiendo todos los detalles sobre las características de Vega, su misión, y las empresas españolas que participan. Pero además, hoy El País publica también un gran texto de Julio Monreal “Vega, una nueva ‘estrella’ en el programa de lanzadores europeo”. Es posiblemente el texto más completo y claro sobre la relevancia que tiene este lanzador. Y lo destacable es que Julio no es periodista, sino un experto de la ESA. Hay noticias de ciencia, donde el texto de un experto puede ser un complemento ideal, y éste sería un buen ejemplo. El lead del artículo (escrito por los redactores de El País) refleja los mensajes clave del texto: Vega permite poner en órbita cargas pequeñas, complementando así otros dos lanzadores europeos para cargas medianas y grandes, y garantizándose la ESA independencia para todo tipo de órbitas y misiones. Julio empieza el artículo diciendo que éste ha sido “el año de los lanzadores” para Europa, y avanza dando detalles técnicos y de construcción que hacen a este lanzador especial.

Otras informaciones vienen por ejemplo de La Vanguardia, que también tiene un enviado especial en la Guayana Francesa. Josep Corbella “El bautismo espacial de Vega, el nuevo cohete europeo” es una completísima nota que empieza situando al lector en Gauayana la noche antes del lanzamiento, y mostrándole que el miedo al fracaso está muy presente en este tipo de lanzamientos.

El Mundo trae la información básica de EFE, pero complementa con un bonito texto desde Galicia de Antonino García “Aplausos desde Galicia para el puntual lanzamiento del XaTcobeo”. El XaTcobeo es el primer satélite construido en Galicia, y que despegó a bordo de Vega. Los párrafos del texto se dedican a contar que todo salió muy bien y todos están sanos y muy felices como si de un parto se tratara, y nos quedamos sin saber muy bien para qué sirve el XaTcobeo y los instrumentos que transporta. Además, en ninguna de ambas historias se menciona al satélite italiano LARES, el principal del cohete cuyo objetivo es medir con precisión el efecto de la relatividad general.

Muchas otras notas de agencia, pero aparte de varias notas quizás demasiado locales sobre el satélite gallego, poca diversidad en los planteamientos. La verdad es que tampoco da tanto juego. Ni es tan atractiva (fijémonos en los escasos retweets y facebook likes) Quizás ha sido buscando originalidad que a alguien en El Espectador se le ocurrió titular “Europa lanzó al espacio la primera nave del siglo XXI”. ¿¿?? En qué estarán pensando…

- Pere Estupinyà

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 [...]]]> 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

So it doesn’t [...]]]> A letter to Nature published today a letter from a few cryosphere experts (they know their  ice) in Boulder at the Univ. of Colorado and the Nat’l Center for Atmosphere Research. It’s mainly a celebration of the growing ability to measure with great precision the  integrated impacts of small changes scattered around the globe. Most important, the two GRACE satellites (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) give continuously-updated snapshots of how much ice is locked in glaciers at mid-latitudes, in big ice caps and ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctic, and so on. The result: melting ice is raising sea level just like we thought. But more of it is from the big ice sheets and less from mountain glaciers including on the Tibetan Plateau. And overall melting appears to be about a third less than had been thought – but it still handily explains the observed rise in sea level. And, GRACE has only been running for eight years. That’s not much from which to extrapolate.

So it doesn’t drastically change the general story as much as it adjusts the partitioning of the action.

But check out these headlines:

• Daily Mail (UK) Rob Waugh:  New satellite data reveals that Himalayan glaciers are melting far more SLOWLY than predicted ; A story that quotes a reporter at the Register (next bullet down) as saying the info in Nature helps to rubbish the UN’s and the IPCC’s belief that ice melt in the HImalayas is a problem.
• Register – Lewis page: New sat data shows Himalayan glaciers hardly melting at all ; This does, as he points out, demolish once more – as in making the rubble bounce -  the IPCC’s stumble into deep muck just about the time of the Copenhagen climate summit debacle. That was when it was revealed that an IPCC summary report erroneously declared Tibet’s glaciers to be doomed to disappear before mid-century. That’s minor news by now, as the error is widely acknowledged.
• The Telegraph – Louise Gray:  Melting glaciers on the Himalays not contributing to sea level rise ;

Press in the UK appears to be, from over here, still quite fascinated by Climategate – and has a number of reporters who regard that episode as a serious sign that standard global warming calculations and observations are a colossal, perhaps even deliberate, error. But the Nature letter’s authors say explicitly that their study does not much alter reasons to worry that ice melt is raising sea level (and if scientists know at all what they are talking about, is sure to accelerate it). It’s newsy enough to learn that Himalaya will keep its glaciers a good long while, but to package it as evidence that the same is true of, oh, Glacier National Park in Montana, is a stretch. So is to frame the letter generally as a blow against standard climate science’s ice-melt division. It makes climate science more robust and not precarious.

Other outlets take a more relaxed view of the news:

• The Guardian – Damian Carrington: The Himalayas and nearby peaks have lost no ice in past 10 years, study shows / … loss of ice caps and glaciers around the world remains a serious concern ;  Still has its focus on the Himalaya surprise, but does not imply that revision is a proxy for major recalibration of global ice loss ; The Guardian also has further exploration of the report and its reception in media generally – via its Ecoaudit man Leo Hickman: Are the worlds’s glaciers threatened by climate change? ; Scroll down through this to the part that says “My verdict.” Amen.
• E&E Greenwire – Paul Voosen: Melting ice sheets already seen driving sea-level rise ; Voosen turns the theme of the topmost stories listed in this post entirely on its head. In short, while researchers have expected that lower-latitude glaciers, impacted earlier and harder by warming, would contribute most of the globe’s ice melt for some time to come with the vast reservoirs of Greenland and Antarctica taking over eventually, Voosen writes that the baton has been passed already, or:  “the future is now.”
• Christian Science Monitor – Peter Spotts: Ice caps not shrinking as much as one thought, new data show ; Yes, but the huge ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland are pretty much making up for it.
• NYTimes/Greenblog – Joanna M. Foster : From 2 Satellites, the Big Picture on Ice Melt; A straightforward account of the new data and the incremental refinement they provide to the larger picture.
• Reuters – David Fogarty: Study: Himalayan glaciers melting more slowly than thought, but seas are still rising ; His lede’s final phrase : “…which should aid studies on how quickly coastal areas may flood as global warmng gathers pace.”  Minor quibble here – Fogarty refers to the GRACE mission as “the name of the satellite.” It’s two tag-team satellites, their slight relative movements a keen gauge of the varying gravity field they encounter.  With aid of fancy mathematical deconvolution, that in turn indicates the distribution of mass (including big wads of frozen water piled up on the ground) behind the wiggles.

Grist for the Mill: Univ. Colorado Press Release ; Includes a very cool video color coded for where ice is accumulating (reds) and vanishing (blues). Not much red to be seen.

Other somewhat pertinent news:

• e360 Digest: Louisiana Report Urges State to Brace for 3 Feet of Sea Level Rise ; This summary, I see on reading more closely, is derived from …
• AP – Cain Burdeau: Low-lying Louisiana prepares for sea level to rise ; Bobby Jindal’s administration put the report out, yet manages not once to mention global warming, it says here. Sometimes Denial is not just a river – it’s a whole ocean and it’s moving into the neighborhood.

- Charlie Petit

Reasons include that most ordinary coughs clear up and usually aren’t that bad in the meantime, hence don’t hold a lot of fascination for medical researchers. Plus, it can be [...]]]> You ever wonder if that lineup of syrups, lozenges, and such-all at the drug store really has something to tame a cough? So do a lot of people. The Inquirer‘s Tom Avril has a consumer health story of the sort we don’t see enough. It doesn’t have the credulous tone of so much writing that blathers on about some or other therapy without offering a shred of evidence from skeptical-by-nature scientists that it might be hocum. He talks to various sources about a common ailment, touts no miracle cure or the cold-cough equivalent to a fad-diet or other empty verbiage. It turns out, says here, that while the cough is perhaps the most common ailment encountered (sniffly runny nose may exceed it) by humanity, it hasn’t gotten much research lately. But there is some, and it is interesting.

Reasons include that most ordinary coughs clear up and usually aren’t that bad in the meantime, hence don’t hold a lot of fascination for medical researchers. Plus, it can be tough to measure efficacy of an anti-cough strategy when the cough is so naturally erratic in its persistence. As Avril writes, making it even more slippery as a research topic is that people can, usually, decide to suppress a cough. Not always. I had a cough recently that lasted for weeks, a full-diaphragm explosion that rattled my airway and couldn’t be denied. But it vanished.

The gist here is that some research is underway, some new therapies may emerge, some old wives tales about what might work are being verified, and some strange treatments (aerosolized chile peppers?!) are getting a look. He cites a study indicating that plain honey, a spoonful, did more for hacking children than did a drug store cough syrup containing a time-honored ingredient (which did nothing at all).  This will be a very heavily-read story by parents in and around Philadelphia, one wagers.

- Charlie Petit

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 [...]]]> 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

The second story for comment comes from Colombia. A reporter explains the pros an cons of a new law that will regulate different aspects of drug distribution in the country, and reports that an interferon-based drug is 30 times more expensive in Colombia than in Europe, that rituximab [...]]]> (English intro to Spanish lang post). Three cases to comment today. First, a comparison between 2 stories published in SciDev show very different approaches to science funding: On one side, Chilean government offers tax breaks and incentives to companies who invest in R&D.  On the other, 5 years ago Venezuela’s Government ordered large companies to invest 0.5 to 2% of their annual income in STI projects (yes; in some countries such orders are possible). But when the government realized that the money was spent inside the companies instead of being granted to Universities or public research centers, Pres. Chavez ordered the companies to pay the tax directly to the ministry, which would then allocate the funding under its criteria. Wow.

The second story for comment comes from Colombia. A reporter explains the pros an cons of a new law that will regulate different aspects of drug distribution in the country, and reports that an interferon-based drug is 30 times more expensive in Colombia than in Europe, that rituximab costs $3500 in Colombia but $278 in UK, and provides some other examples of medications that are much more costly in Colombia. And then the story says: “the pharma industry has not given an explanation about these differences yet”. Man; here is the story!

The third case goes to México, and the sometimes-paradoxical science section of El Universal. Paradoxical because we often see good local stories from its reporters (today it has a great one about Mexico’s biggest supercomputer), but we too often see extremely sensationalistic and exaggerated headlines from wires. Today in the center of Universal’s science section we read “fasting has similar effect to chemotherapy”.

A los que tenemos alma científica nos entusiasma leer un artículo y terminar con más dudas de las que empezamos. Queremos nos respondan preguntas pero también gusta que nos abran interrogantes. Aquellos con vocación periodística lo ven diferente: los textos deben dar toda la información posible y no dejar al lector con dudas en el aire. Por eso nos sorprende un aspecto del buen texto de Pablo Correa “Medicamentos biotecnológicos: la batalla de los US$ 1.000 millones” en El Espectador de Colombia. Pablo va abordando muy bien las vicisitudes de la reforma de medicamentos que afronta el país. Pero de repente, nos cuenta que el interferón 1-B es un 3.204% más caro en Colombia que en Europa, que el rituximab cuesta US$3500 en Colombia y $278 en UK, da otros ejemplos… y dice: “¿Por qué el mismo medicamento es cobrado a precios exorbitantes en un país con índices de pobreza como los de Colombia? Es una explicación que las grandes casas farmacéuticas aún le deben al país.” Ostras! (eufemismo) Aquí está el tema a investigar!!! El tracker desconoce si ocurre en otros países. Pero ese sería un muy buen trabajo de periodismo de salud. Aprovechemos para citar otra buena nota de Pablo “Guardería de corales” sobre la restauración de corales en costas colombianas. E interesante el anuncio de que Colombia quiere aumentar su cantera de doctores, en El Tiempo. Con esa perspectiva que al tracker le da ir revisando la información científica, da la sensación que el interés por la ciencia en Colombia realmente va aumentando.

Otra tendencia que observamos demasiado a menudo, es que algunas secciones de ciencia no saben hacer filtro entre las buenas notas y la paja sensacionalista que las agencias a menudo envían. EFE en particular. Ponemos la imagen para mostrar que este titular ha sido publicado tal cual en El Universal (México): “Ayunar tiene impacto similar que quimioterapias”. Distorsión de la información del estudio que debería avergonzar a quien puso el título, sea desde EFE o El Universal. Y a quien se la colaron en el último caso. Con “Ayunar mejora la eficacia de las terapias contra el cáncer”, Milenio mostró un mucho mejor criterio. Realmente, una lástima que el gran texto de Guillermo Cárdenas “Supercerebros digitales” en El Universal sobre supercomputadoras y la más potente mexicana (Xiuhcoatl) quede desdibujado por culpa de ese nefasto titular.

Vayamos hacia Scidev y sus buenas notas de política científica, que en esta ocasión nos dejan un poquito a medias. Aleida Rueda nos cuenta que Panamá recibirá un millón de dólares del Fondo de Nagoya contra biopiratería, que será utilizado en bioprospección de sus recursos naturales. Es el primer proyecto adjudicado del fondo. La nota está muy bien presentada y da muchos detalles, pero los dos últimos párrafos insinúan puntos interesantes no abordados: 1-qué ocurre con la propiedad intelectual de los compuestos que se obtengan, y 2- ¿Qué quiere decir, como última frase del artículo “No se sabe si Panamá tiene la institucionalidad ambiental, jurídica y la experiencia burocrática para enfrentar este proyecto”? .  También en SciDev Marielba Núñez dice que la controversia por fondos para ciencia sigue en Venezuela. La controversia se refiere a que desde hace 5 años el gobierno de Chávez estaba exigiendo a las grandes empresas invertir un porcentaje en i+D, pero tras constatar que solían gastárselo en sus proyectos internos en lugar de universidades y centros públicos (¿de verdad esperaban eso?), la ley ha sido modificada para que este dinero vaya directamente al ministerio y de allí se distribuya. La ventaja es que se ganan fondos públicos para la ciencia. Pero según algunos investigadores que deben pensar que en otros países los científicos hacen lo que quieren, el gobierno toma control excesivo de las líneas de investigación. Como se hace en todo el mundo, no sólo Venezuela, vaya. Interesante comparar con la nota de María Elena Hurtado “Chile: nuevos incentivos fiscales para estimular la i+D”. La política chilena (dar dinero público a la empresa privada para que innove) parece opuesta a la Venezolana (poner más impuestos a la empresa para fondos públicos en innovación). Sería interesante algún experto comparando ambos enfoques.

 - Pere Estupinyà

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, [...]]]>

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

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 [...]]]> 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.