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.

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

But then I  read the perfectly sound news account in UK’s The Register by Ian Sample – a tale of galloping crocodiles and other early oddballs of the clan that lived in what is now the Sahara . Sample was first to tell me that the full paper in the journal ZooKeys is open access . I took a look. It’s hugely long, a 140-page monograph, and a big download. But just scrolling along past all the cladograms and drawings and photos of jumbled and cleaned-up bones from the Cretaceous is mesmerizing. It’s a reminder of the hard, punctilious work that goes into such publications, whether by superstars like Sereno or those laboring in obscurity to get just right their presentation of a new order of funguses. Experts, for all I know, will shred the paper. Maybe an overworked team of post-docs and grad students and field assistants did much of the scutwork. But it sure is impressive to these eyes.

The pic up there is a more or less random screenshot from the paper – of a creature nicknamed boarcroc by the NGS publicity machine. Right here is one of Geographic’s glossy publicity photo-graphic mashups showing Sereno with the giant skull of a megacrocodile Sereno and co-authors reported a while ago. Also there are a few others including the most recent three, previously undescribed species. Several, it says here, walked and ran more like long-legged dogs than today’s distant kin with their splayed limbs.

Several outlets didn’t check the clips, or Wikipedia for that matter, and went with headlines heralding discovery of a supercroc dino-diner rather than the new discoveries. The monograph may be their first fully realized appearance in a journal, but news on the big guy goes way back.

For one example:

• USA Today – Dan Vergano, Oct. 25, 2001: What a croc: Beast ate dinosaurs .

To learn more about today’s news spate, read Sample’s piece and a few of or all these other stories (or venture a dive beyond the press release and into the paper linked well below in Grist):

• Chicago Sun Times – Dave Newbart: Ancient crocs ate dinosaurs ; the dino-eating angle has been reported before, but is IS the title theme of the upcoming TV special.
• Chicago Tribune – William Mullen : U. of C.’s Sereno unveile ancient crocodile fossils ;
• AP – Randolph E. Schmid: 3 new ancient crocodile species fossils found ; One is struck in this solid story that Schmid (or perhaps an editor) felt it important to point out that none were maneaters, 100 million years ago, as there were no people then. Very, very true.
• Reuters : New fossils reveal a world full of crocodiles ; no byline, perhaps as its rewritten so directly from press material, but among the calmer and more informative of the lot.
• Independent (UK) Steve Connor : Scientists unearth ’supercroc’ that dined on dinosaurs / paleontologists uncover five new crocodile species in Sahara ; yes, they have, but only three are newsy new.
• AFP: Five strange ancient crocs found in Sahara desert ;
• Telegraph – Kate Devlin: ‘BoarCroc’ and ‘DuckCroc’ among five ancient species of crocodile discovered ; Excellent, Ms. Devlin – she says plain as day in her 2d graf: “uncovered by Paul Sereno…who famously discovered the species dubbed ‘Supercroc’ in 2001.”
• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Three ancient crocodile species unearthed ; He eschews any more super-croc ink to, smartly, deliver some fascination about how crocs and mammals interacted and competed way back then.
• Nat’l Geographic News – Christine Dell’Amore: 5 ‘Oddball” Crocs Discovered, Including Dinosaur-Eater ; Natch, plenty of links to videos and more pictures and to the TV show site.
• AAAS ScienceNow -  Phil Berardelli: Slideshow: Ancient Crocs with a Dog-Like Walk ;
• … could go on. Let me know if any special ones got omitted.

Grist for the Mill: Nat’l Geographic Society Press Release ; ZooKeys  abstract and Open Access to article (choice of PDF file sizes, both large).

- Charlie Petit

“El alcohol protege el corazón” es una frase que ya habréis leído centenares de ocasiones. No es noticia, y ya resulta cansino. Pero hay buenas razones para comentar en el Tracker un nuevo estudio realizado por investigadores españoles sobre la ingesta de alcohol y el riesgo de enfermedades coronarias. La más importante: no es un estudio en ratitas, ni cultivos celulares, ni prospectivo con una muestra pobre de individuos. Se trata de un estudio de cohortes que ha estado siguiendo a más de 40.000 personas durante 10 años. Si queremos acercarnos a la realidad, nos deberíamos dejar guiar más por la metodología de los estudios que por la espectacularidad de los resultados. En este caso, la metodología hace que esta investigación pueda ser noticiable. ¿Cuál es el resultado? Tomar alcohol de forma moderada, o incluso en exceso, reduce hasta un 30% la enfermedad coronaria en hombres (en mujeres los resultados no han sido concluyentes). Éste “incluso en exceso” es lo más novedoso que ofrece la investigación, y también podría justificar hablar de ella.

Segunda razón para comentarlo en el tracker: ojito cómo lo reportamos. Si reflejas lo que dice esta nota de prensa de AFP – “El alcohol ayuda a reducir el riesgo de enfermedades cardiacas”, te quedas sólo en la parte superficial de los resultados. Si lees la de EFE, verás que la investigadora principal del estudio advierte: “aunque algunos están deseando escuchar que beber alcohol es bueno, el estudio no dice eso. la ingesta abusiva de alcohol es perjudicial para todo el mundo y causa más daño que beneficio”.

El Universal (México) habrá considerado esta última, porque en la segunda frase de su artículo muy bien dice: “Los expertos remarcaron que pese a estos resultados, ingerir alcohol puede aumentar el riesgo en otro tipo de enfermedades”.

BBC Mundo – “Mucho alcohol ¿protege o mata?”, hace un buen trabajo buscando opiniones externas. Y son muy críticas, tanto por supuestas lagunas en la metodología, como porque el estudio no analizó el impacto del alcohol en otras enfermedades, como cáncer, hepáticas o accidentes cerebrovasculares. Aquí es cuando, además de la metodología y el resultado, deberíamos fijarnos en qué revista lo publica. La inglesa Heart, con un factor de impacto que no alcanza el 5, nos debería hacer pensar que, a pesar del buen tamaño de muestra, algo no termina de encajar en este estudio.

Conclusión: Entre la controversia, los resultados poco novedosos del estudio, y el dudoso valor social de dar a conocerlos, no parece imprescindible que esta investigación salga de los círculos de comunicación entre científicos, a pesar que ofrezca un titular tentador.

- Pere Estupinyà

Kathleen Doheny

In an item Wednesday on Katie Couric’s Notebook, the CBS evening news anchor says “when it comes to your health, making an informed decision in consultation with your doctor is the wisest thing you can do.”

A blog item on The Baltimore Sun site by Kelly Brewington says, “So, now what? Talk to your doctor, says the panel,” a reference to the government panel that issued the new guidelines.

This is something many of us have written dozens or even hundreds of times. Confused by what we’re reporting? Consult your doctor. Uncertain whether to believe the latest good or bad news about breast cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, or stem cells? Talk to your doctor.

We don’t make this up; we write it because our sources tell us that’s what our readers or listeners should do. But who is helped by that? Most doctors found out about the new mammography guidelines the same time the rest of us did. Some of them might have taken the time to look up the panel’s report and read it. Many probably did not. And few of them are qualified to evaluate it.

That’s true even for oncologists who specialize in breast cancer. They know a lot about how cancer drugs work, and which ones to use in particular circumstances, and when a lumpectomy is the right call. But they may know little about the risks and benefits of mammograms; that’s not their field.

Radiologists know a lot about mammograms, but their expertise is in using them to diagnose cancer, not in population-wide assessments of risks and benefits.

The people who might know something about this are preventive medicine specialists and epidemiologists, or other doctors who have chose to specialize in this kind of public-health analysis in addition to learning to treat disease.

Most readers who see “consult your doctor” do not have a doctor who’s qualified to comment on new research findings. Medical students are not routinely taught research methods. Few study epidemiology or public health. They treat the sick; that’s what they’re good at.

Wait a minute! I’ve got it: “Consult your family’s epidemiologist!”

An obstetrician once complained to my wife, Elizabeth, a medical reporter, about these stories.”Why do you send your readers to us?” she said. “We don’t know what to tell them!”

Starting now, when somebody tells us that readers “should consult their doctors,” we should press them for more than that. What doctors? Who is in a position to provide useful advice on this? Where should readers and listeners go if their doctors don’t have the appropriate expertise, or if they don’t have a doctor?

We owe our audience a little bit more effort on this. Or else we should drop the line, “consult your doctor.” In many cases, it’s worthless advice.

- Paul Raeburn

We have a tiny usage issue to entertain us today. The Tracker yesterday read in the New York Times the account of the drama by Kenneth Chang. Something kept bumping on my cerebellum until I finally recognized the reason. The reason is the. Maybe it’s long been NYT’s style, but he called the machine The Spirit, and more than once. There also is a the Opportunity. This is of course consistent with style for most machines and their names – it’s the Hubble, the Queen Mary 2, and the Chevy Volt, after all. But since it’s launch NASA and the scientists who work for it under contract have relentlessly anthropomorphized Spirit and her sibling Opportunity, even noting prominently in literature and interviews that these things are regarded as she things. I for one bought it -  did a whole long article in Nat’l Geographic in NASA’s machine-friendly preferred style.

Then along comes Chang and The Spirit, as he starts one paragraph.

Other outlets tend to do it without that article. At the San Francisco Chronicle today science editor David Perlman eschews the the for Spirit throughout his account (history and small world – and not terribly relevant – note: Perlman helped break Chang into the news biz some years back when the latter did a summer internship in San Francisco).

Ah well. Good tidings, Spirit, whoever or whatever you are.

Other stories:

• Space.com – Andrea Thompson: NASA to begin escape attempt for Mars rover ;
• Los Angeles Times – John Johnson Jr. (Nov 13): For Mars rover Spirit, it’s do or die ; It might live on as a weather station, he reports. But without ability to maneuver for the best angle to the Sun, dead batteries might make that mode a short-lived one.
• AP – Alicia Change (nov. 12): NASA to try to free stuck Mars rover, Spirit. Ah HA, she writes right in the lede “the Spirit!” An ally for NYTimes’s usage? Not really. Her full sentence goes on “…the Spirit may be willing but…” and then it’s good ol’ Spirit the rest of the way.

Grist for the Mill: JPL NASA Press Release ; Exploration Rover Program;

- Charlie Petit

What catches the eye is his mention that several of the researchers with new data on the object would not speak with Cowen as their report is pending in Science. But other scientists, their paper similarly working its way toward publication in Nature, felt free to speak with him. Much of the news is already in circulation among experts, via a meeting earlier this month as well as the on line arXiv site. This seems to be more reason to suspect that embargoes by such august journals to be artificial and presumptuous until shown otherwise. The Tracker is not urging anybody to just ignore embargoes of news without doing some digging to see if the news is already effectively out – but I also predict that embargoes will continue to skid as information these days gets ever-more slippery.

Grist for the Mill: arXiv Discovery of extreme particle acceleration in hte microquasar Cygnus X-3 ;

- Charlie Petit

Stories:

• Japan Times: Aquarium snaps world’s first photos of young coelecanth;
• Brisbane Times: No story, but it HAS THE VIDEO ‘ , courtesy of Reuters.
• AFP: Japanese researchers film rare baby fish ‘fossil’ ; OK, this is not an obscure service.
• Daily Mail: Scientists capture world’s first images of baby coelacanth fish – dubbed a ‘living fossil’ ;

*Now I know two of Lynne Friedmann’s abiding interests. One is Mount Wilson Observatory, as previously noted in posts. Today it is coelecanths. Thx for the tip;

- Charlie Petit

The news complements the bigger surge in the last two days that followed publication in Nature Geoscience and by The Carbon Project (see yesterday’s post) on CO2’s rise. That report also cited a wane in carbon sinks, an aspect that often got lost as reporter’s scrambled to tell a coherent story about a wide-ranging and very long report.

Other Stories:

• National Geographic News – Christine Dell’Amore: Ocean Losing Its Appetite for Carbon ;
• Voice of America – Jessica Berman : Oceans’ Ability to Mop-Up Greenhouse Gas Declines ; A source tells her the acidification of the ocean is itself a reason it is losing capacity to absorb CO2 quickly.
• NYTimes – Sindya N. Bhanoo – Seas Grow Less Effective at Absorbing Emissions ;

Grist for the Mill: Columbia U. Earth Institute Press Release ; PLus extra background info ;

- Charlie Petit