This week two news events featured nuclear power. In the US the Dept. of Energy announced a fairly small, on the atomic scale, grant for study of new, more efficient high temperature “next generation” reactors. In France President Sarkozy waved the flag for gallic technology to help fill expected international orders for hundreds of new reactors in coming decades.

The U.S. news got coverage, but one hopes it will get deeper in coming days or weeks. The essence is simple: About $40 million to the General Atomics Co., and to Toshiba-owned Westinghouse Electric Co., to refine  “Next Generation Nuclear Plant” designs. Such reactors, cooled by helium, would run at higher temperatures than standard reactors and, some say, would be more efficient and inherently more stable than water-cooled ones now widely in use. This is an opening into whether high-temperature, so-called “fast” reactors are also going to go on a faster track. Such things use a fuel cycle that burns, or transmutes, most of the radioactive waste that make long-term disposal such a headache. They also are complex, and may make weapons proliferation harder to control, worry some. But of that, nothing here in these tidbits:

Stories:

• Reuters – Tom Doggett: US Govt awards $40 mln for advance nuclear reactor ;
• Wall St. Journal – Ian Talley: DOE Announces $40Mln For Next Generation Nuclear Project ; A super shorty.
• World Nuclear News : Teams compete for NGNP design ; A trade pub, perhaps no surprise, fills in a lot of blanks, including an allusion to related work on “deep burn” reactors that could radically reduce the volume of waste from nuclear energy.

Grist for the Mill: DOE Press Release ;

And from France the bigger story – the offense by the government, featured at a conference in Paris, to encourage a rapid expansion of nuclear power, including in developing countries.

• Reuters – Marie Maitre, Crispian Balmer: Sarkozy backs nuclear energy / Other sources cause greater pollution, he says ;
• Voice of America – Lisa Bryant: French President Pushes Use of Nuclear energy ;
• Financial Times – Peggy Hollinger, Ed Crooks: Sarkozy in call over nuclear energy funding ; Good, broad-look story with solid money estimates. Among other eye-catching numbers: the Nuclear Energy Agency estimates that between 100 and 400 new reactors are likely worldwide in the next 20 years.

And finally, a news that isn’t the news that it means to be news – nukes in Israel:

• NYTimes – Steven Erlanger: Israel Intends to Build Civilian Nuclear Plants ; Maybe electricity is the ostensible topic, but a rare aspect of nukes in the MidEast is first up in this article’s lede: “Israel, widely believed to have nuclear weapons…” and then it goes on about power reactors. This leads to a question for the nation’s and the world’s political and diplomacy writers. Why is it, in stories about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, it is left implicit for many readers that success would make Iran the first nuclear-armed power in the region? Yet, for years, everybody who follows such things “knows” that Israel has them. I would never equate an Israeli bomb to an Iranian bomb in terms of threat to world stability – but one would think that any story about Iran’s ambitions ought to mention that it may be trying to match Israel’s arsenal. It almost seems like willful blindness in news coverage.

Pic: older illus of General Atomics Helium Cooled Gas Turbine Reactor;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) The Chilean Earthquake might become the most scientifically studied earthquake ever. We’ve read stories about the state of seismic predictions, changes in Earth axis, non-relation with other recent earthquakes, increased interest in monitoring risk in some Latin American countries… today many newspapers talk about the 3 meters movement of the city of Concepción and others in Argentina. But we have also found a really interesting story analyzing the possible increase in volcanism activity in the region. An expert alerted that this has frequently happened in the past. The journalist consults a geologist form Chile who says they haven’t perceived any anomalies yet, and that this only happens when the volcanoes are “ready” to erupt.

El terremoto de Chile va camino de convertirse en el más estudiado científicamente de la historia. Y seguramente, el que más notas de ciencia diferentes genere. Ya hablamos del ligero cambio de eje terrestre que provocó, de si el seísmo podía o no predecirse, de cuál es el riesgo en otros países latinoamericanos, de si disminuye las posibilidades chilenas de alojar el gran telescopio europeo, y de si la mayor actividad sísmica reciente es casualidad. Hoy todas las secciones de ciencia recogen la noticia de los 3 metros que se desplazó la ciudad de Concepción. Y todavía encontramos otra interesante aproximación: ¿Aumenta el riesgo de vulcanismo tras el terremoto?. Hagamos un repaso, empezando por esta última nota.

La Nación (Chile), presenta un detallado reportaje de Cristina Espinoza: “Advierten peligro de erupciones tras terremoto”. Un vulcanólogo estadounidense advirtió que tras grandes seísmos, suele haber un aumento de las erupciones volcánicas. Al menos, esto es lo que sugieren los registros históricos, y bien podría ocurrir en Chile. Cristina recoge este dato, pero lo contrasta con geólogos de la Red de Vigilancia Volcánica de Chile. “Si, si… lo sabemos. Empezamos a monitorizar nuestros volcanes de inmediato y seguiremos alerta durante un tiempo, pero de momento no hemos registrado ninguna anomalía”, viene a decir un experto. “De hecho, esta estadística es un poco frágil. Sólo ocurre si los volcanes estás listos para una pronta erupción”, opina otro. Buen texto, y buen gráfico con los volcanes “al acecho”.

Respecto los tres metros que se desplazó al oeste la ciudad de Concepción, los 27 cm de Santiago, los 4 de Buenos Aires, y los 13 de Mendoza, en La Nación (Argentina) , Sebastián Ríos abre su texto con una gran frase: “Cuando el suelo bajo nuestros pies se mueve a 8,8 grados en la escala de Richter, las cosas no siempre aparecen en el mismo lugar en el que se encontraban antes del terremoto”. Entrevistando a un científico local, consigue otra que tampoco tiene desperdicio: “La tierra firme, para nosotros los geólogos, no existe” (en referencia al movimiento de placas tectónicas). La noticia se recoge con buen detalle en BBC Mundo, y aparece en gran cantidad de medios como La Jornada (Mex), ElSalvador.com, La Tercera (Chile) El correo (Perú), Juventud Rebelde (Cuba), etc… en Clarín, Sibila Camps explica que los desplazamientos son algo natural, y ya los observó Darwin durante su viaje en el Beagle.

También interesante en El País cómo Alicia Rivera explica que “El terremoto de Chile no era una sorpresa”, pues los sismólogos llevaban años midiendo el movimiento de placas, habían advertido acumulación de tensiones, y registrado terremotos grandes en las costas Chilenas cada 8-10 años, pero a excepción del área de Concepción que sufrió su último gran seísmo en 1835. Lejos de Chile pero cercano a los tsunamis, en ABC Judith de Jorge presenta a “El hombre que puede evitar catástrofes”. Interesante cómo este experto en mecánica de fluidos investiga para ser capaces de predecir con mayor antelación tsunamis, inundaciones, incendios, o roturas de diques.

Con un tono ligeramente alarmista, Diario de las Américas titula un artículo de Sergio Bofelli “El próximo terremoto en Managua”, y tras entrevistar a un experto concluye que la posibilidad de que en los próximos 3 a 6 años se produzca un terremoto en la capital Nicaragüense es de entre el 50 y el 100%. Y debido a el mal estado arquitectónico, causaría 35.000 muertos. Qué precisión…

Veremos cómo continúa la inercia informativa sobre los terremotos.

- Pere Estupinyà

Try deconstructing this sentence, the lede to a WaPost story today by Joel Achenbach, which on its face seems to say one thing but could mean quite another: “Harrison Schmitt’s credentials as a space policy analyst include several days of walking on the moon.”

Hmm, well okay. Plus, as Achenbach adds, he is a former Senator. But really, walking on the moon makes one a space policy analyst … or merely an advocate?  One might as well write, “Al Unser Jr.’s credentials as a mass transit analyst include a victory in the Indy 500.”  Which is to say, Achenbach could be making a sly point about lack of credentials. Or not. Hard to say.

The story is about the intense reaction, including by Schmitt, against the administration’s drive to pole-ax NASA’s new human-rated rockets before they even reach the launch pad, and to re-think the whole return to the Moon and then on-to-Mars plan it inherited from the last administration.

The evasive tone of the lede fits an article that doesn’t overtly lead where one might expect. It starts with accounts of the powerful forces and emotions working against the proposed alteration of focus at NASA. But then it says the fight is over public relations, hardly a metric for substance. Following along are some calmly recited budget facts and other factors that tend to defuse some arguments from the protesters. We read that much of it is about jobs, and about  the ability to carry Florida by any who can be linked by party to the President.

And finally, to get back to the story’s top, the first quote from Schmitt is his distress that Obama seems not to believe in American exceptionalism. That, too, is a term that, depending on whom one consults, may have little to do with rational analysis and a lot to do with hubris and emotion. The ending is provided by private entrepreneur Elon Musk, he of SpaceX and a nice new launcher that may or may not work in an upcoming test – and who is eager to try to fill the void left by any designed-to-NASA specs (and some would therefore snort, “socialist”) rocket. Does Musk represent a new and better, entrepreneurial future? A foe of exceptionalism? What?

The story is entertaining to me because it seems mischievous, hard to judge, a chameleon – it’s meaning likely to shift widely and according to the perception and background of the reader.

Minor, interesting Grist for the Mill:

SpaceX update on an abort to a static test yesterday for the new Falcon 9 launcher.

Pic: Falcon9 on pad, source ;

- Charlie Petit

Several outlets jumped out with advance word today that the UN is set to unveil an independent  panel that will check the way the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sizes up global warming. Just guessing here – but one suspects that the effort by the InterAcademy Council (umbrella group to national academies around the world) will be solid; one suspects also that unless it decides global warming is a fraud, the results will have no impact on doubters who figure that if the panel’s membership has outstanding experts and they give the IPCC any kind of pass, that just means they all along were in on the “scam.”

If and when that happens, the challenge for reporters will be to pay close attention to the reviewer’s credentials and analytical data process, and to compare those with the tools employed by any who reject the panel’s eventual findings.

Advance Stories:

• Wall St. Journal – Jeffrey Ball: U.N. to Announce Reivew of Climate Panel ;
• AP  – Seth Borenstein: Outside science academies to review warming panel ; (LATE ADDITION – Update here following the announcement today).
• Reuters – Gerard Wynn: UK academy aids study to regain climate data trust ;
• Times (UK) Ben Webster: UN to review errors made by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ;

Somewhat Related Astrology News:

• Washington Post (blog) Stephen Stromberg: Climate-change deniers take a lesson from anti-evolution activists ; This is mostly about climate change deniers, not the supposed alliance with anti-evolutionists (a camp that includes young-Earth creationists who might not like evoking “natural cycles” when their Earth is too young to have had many of those). Main reason to read it: its link to a  South Dakota state legislature resolution that declares global warming theory is just a theory ergo is probably all made up …. and anyway other known causes of climate change include astrological factors. It seems unlikely this is just because one elected rep’s staffer had a brain cramp and accidentally equated astronomy to astrology. More than three dozen legislators signed off on that as co-sponsors.

- Charlie Petit

Wow, a new form of energy transmission! With nanotubes.  And rings of fire and blistering-fast heat transfer. From MIT researchers yet – and yes I get a paycheck from MIT, so always wonder in my deep heart how to avoid either favoritism or backwards-leaning overcompensation when mentioning MIT or Technology Review even from way out here in Berkeley. But the release is written by old hand David Chandler in the press office, so that’s a good sign it’s legit, too.

But. I cannot  figure out from the release or from press coverage very much of how the process, identified as potentially useful for batteries with an energy density far higher than anything we have now, works and what’s left after it works or how one would throttle such a thing. Science writers, in addition to the nose for nonsense, hype, and scam that any reporter needs if he or she is worth a paycheck, need to work particularly hard at sheer explanation. That’s our added value – ability to boil the technical jargon and concepts of biology or physics or chemistry that terrify most reporters and reduce it to reasonably simple English. Throw in some narrative on the discovery process and its context you have a story. If a phenomenon is new to science or merely to the layman, this means taking the reader inside the genomes or stellar cores or combustion chambers or atoms and molecules and widgetry to provide a sense, however shielded in metaphor and simile, of what in tarnation is supposedly going on.

Sometimes it’s almost impossible. But in this case it seems doable,  even on  deadline.  This did not, it appears, get much pickup in mass media. Where it did, there is heat but little light.

Whew. Okay. The news is that a team of engineers from MIT and Korea’s  Sungkyunkwan University report in Nature Materials what they call a “thermopower wave” racing along carbon nanotubes after they are coated with a fuel called cyclotremethyelene trinitramine and ignited at one end. That a heat pulse and reactive wave ripped along the nanotubes was not a surprise. What is a surprise, it appears, is that the wave also gathered up an electric charge and surfed it along, too, setting up a voltage gradient with a power and total energy delivery per gram of reactant far higher than the best batteries.

I dunno about you but that sounds like an explosion with sparks, to me. The pulse has a temperature of nearly 3000 K. So one asks – is the nanotube destroyed by this? Can the process plausibly be controlled or is it more like a teeny bomb? What hypothetical paths exist between this exciting laboratory discovery to, as the release says it potentially is, a battery?

Did anybody call the team’s leaders and ask how big the experimental device is, whether the nanotubes are teeny teeny or long enough to see and does that matter, what noise does it make, does it destroy itself, does it smell, does it require an oxygen-rich atmosphere or other oxidizer  or is that part of the fuel? Please, give us a feel for this, insight into what all the dramatic verbs, adverbs, and adjectives in the release and the paper represent.

Good luck finding satisfaction (I could not) in these few accounts:

• BBC – Nanometre ‘fuses’ for high-performance batteries ; It says here it’s a one-time use, but might find application in fuel cells.
• Register (UK) Lewis Page: MIT profs produce “Ring of Fire’ nanotube superbatteries ; Double boffin-alert. Quotes are all, far as I can see, from the press release. Page does credit a “statement” as a source, high in the piece, but not directly for these quotes that he presumably did not hear with his own ears. Page has a good line – noting that the controllability of the reaction is unclear and could mean “worsening of that well-known modern scourge the trouser inferno” from battery ignition. Thus, under a hed that flat-out proclaims production of super-batteries, he writes contrarily that “there’s no doubt a lot of work to be done.”

A bit better at specialty sites:

• Chemistry World – Jon Cartwright (Royal Society of Chemistry) : Hardly popular press, this does declare that after one pulse goes off, the system “can be reloaded for more.”
• Ars Technica – Casey Johnston: Nanotubes help create thermopower waves ; Another site that is not media in the usual sense, and Johnson apparently interpreted the paper with considerable savvy – but apparently did no direct reporting beyond the journal and release. Nonetheless, this gives at least a feel for what is going on. This asks a good question – if the electric current is a complete surprise, by what good chance did the experimenters happen to have wired the device so they could measure it?

Grist for the Mill: MIT Press Release ; Nature abstract ;

PIc: From paper, Nature Materials.

- Charlie Petit

Two rather straightforward events in the news today provide a startling contrast:

1) In Los Angeles, a sting operation linked to the Oscars nets a sushi restaurant serving slices of sei whale. The makers of The Cove, a documentary that won an Oscar for its vivid chronicle of a dolphin slaughter in Japan , spent a few days beforehand setting up a sting (regarding the documentary, a brief, haunting image of a blood red inlet flashed during the televised proceedings, probably the same place as in this photo). A Southern California restaurant now seems to face serious violation of the Marine Mammal Protection Act:

• NYTimes – Jennifer Steinhauer: Oscar Winners Try to Keep Whale Off Sushi Plates ;

2) In Ottawa, the Parliament’s inhouse restaurant will be regularly featuring seal meat. This is to show solidarity with hunters of harp seals in the nation’s far north, and defiance of the European Union’s ban in import of meat or other seal parts gained from the hunt. Tomorrow: seal loin wrapped in double-smoked bacon with a port reduction sauce.

• BBC – Canada MPs to dine on seal meat ;
• Reuters: Seal meat to be on menu at Canadian Parliament ;
• Globe and Mail – Gloria Galloway: Seal on the menu for parliamentarians ; The lede: “The taste is apparently quite gamy – sort of like moose but not really like moose at all….”

I’ve no comment on the quality of this news or the writing of it. It does seem legit and the reporting is somewhat routine. But it adds up to a whiplash in the brain. Sei whales are an easy call. But what to think, what to think — why not eat seals if one also eats moose??

Pic source ;

- Charlie Petit

The AP’s Seth Borenstein does a solid job of producing a long story today, about earthquakes and the public’s perception of them. He could have tossed off a shorty and gotten himself off the hook with editors eager for this sort of inevitable story. A question arises after any spate of bad weather, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, or other natural hazard. Is  this abnormal? Is god or fate angry with us? At least underground nuclear tests have faded, for the most part, into history. Those used to generate serious public hypotheses  pinning on them the finger of blame for quakes – but essentially never inspired certified experts to endorse the suspicion. Writing on that got to be a deep pain.

Borenstein not only gathers up enough stats, and explains them clearly, to convince almost anybody that, tectonically, the Earth is up to no particular mischief. He also, more enterprisingly, gets examples of what is also true: it seems worse because so many cities have grown so fast in recent years, often near faults and often with people crowded into tall, badly-designed and shoddily-made buildings. Then when they fall down the 24 hour news cycle means the injuries, death, and destruction get replayed many times.

A problem for Borenstein as a beat writer is that, in a year or a few years, he’ll be again given this same assignment. He will not be able merely to re-run this one. So he’ll have to make the calls, take the notes, write the same old same old …. unless he can get some new member of the staff  to do it for the first time and make it seem fresh.

Related News:

• The Washington Post carries on line today a transcript of a public call-in to a US Geological Survey seismologist.

- Charlie Petit

The Albuquerque Journal, bless its publisher’s heart, insists on trying to make a profit by not giving its product away entirely free on the internet. But the hurdles to reaching stories are not all that high and well worth it for this one. Science writer John Fleck has a front page column called A Third View on Climate Change in the paper today. He interviews Ted Nordhaus, a local man who has moved away but still visits the region often.  Nordhaus is chairman of the Breakthrough Institute and, with co-author Michael Schellenberger (the institute’s president), writer of a book that made quite a splash just a few years ago, The Death of Environmentalism.

This is skillful column writing. Fleck’s subject is a man with harsh critics on both ends of the climate change science spectrum – he thinks mankind is wrecking the planet’s livability so the skeptics snort at him as a lefty; he thinks enviros are out of touch with reality on how to cope with it so he and Schellenberger get lumped among the skeptics and right-wing obstructionists colluding to just let the Earth’s climate go.

But the column starts off nice and easy – introducing Nordhaus as a New Mexican at heart with deep roots and hence no pointy headed outsider out to socialize the land and thus perhaps permitting the large contingent of Western conservative private property rights zealots in the readership to keep reading without blowing blood pressure gaskets. The liberals will read it because, well, you know liberals – they’ll read anything, just out of curiosity.

He then walks through the “third view” of climate policy. Which is in part to work on technology and invest in brains without trying to rush costly carbon taxes or even caps on a public that, overall, is more inclined to embrace stupid denialism than take a hard hit in its purses and wallets. I have my own quarrels – if we wait until renewable and nuclear power (and conservation) can compete head to head with coal and oil that don’t get saddled with the costs of their “externalities,” it may be too late. On the other hand, this piece suggests but not in so many words, it’s been 20 years since the Earth Summit in Rio. For all the nice speeches there, fossil and cut-forest carbon emissions are roaring ahead. Ergo, the Kyoto model isn’t working and maybe never will.

Bleh. Too bad for us. So depressing. But maybe true. And, fortunately, for all the anguish over inability so far to put the clamps on carbon today or this decade even, the US and many other nations ARE pouring money into basic research.

Pray for breakthroughs. I’ll take a dose of inertial fusion, a slice of instant cellulosic simple-sugar-maker, a tall stack of solar cells as cheap as roof shingles, and a pile of rechargables that’ll drive an electric sedan for 300 miles.

Meanwhile, in the real, real world of renewable energy Dept (I gotta stick this somewhere):

NY Times – Elisabeth Rosenthal: Solar Industry Learns Lessons in Spanish Sun ; Given giant subsidies, solar energy plants overshot the mark, were prone to be badly designed, inefficient, etc. Rosenthal does plant a ray of hope at the end of this somewhat dispiriting article.

- Charlie Petit

Maybe it’s just me, but I felt I hit a sweet spot reading the Science Times this morning and am feeling chipper. I think it was pages 1 and 3 that did it. For those whose digital reading habits deny them the occasional pleasures of good on-page layout (or lucky, which can be better then good) in an old fashioned medium, the newspaper, here is the order of initial reading that got the morning off to a fine start:

• Dennis Overbye : Madison Avenue’s Moon Shot ; The lead art piece, with emphasis on art and inspired graphic design. Overbye reviews a book that collects ads from big corporations that ran in the aviation trade press – such things as Aviation Week or Air Force magazine in the late 50s to early 60s. The book authors see the ads’ boosterism, Overbye suggests, as a variant of science fiction.  I saw them as a kid. Dad subscribed to both magazines just mentioned. We learn here that many were cynical bait-and-switch loss-leaders for recruitment of new employees but, to me (and Overbye, it seems) they were  intoxicating. The gallery of ads is here.
• Kenneth Chang : Scientists see fresh evidence of more water on the moon ; Oberbye’s re-encounter with the semi-insane giddiness of the early space age jumps to page 3, where right under it is this sober, satisfying taste of the state of play in space today. Robots, not people, are making the discoveries. The moon is not dry, it is encrusted top and bottom in clear ice (so they say). And, underplayed in this tidy account, the data may be from a US instrument but it was aboard an orbiter conceived, designed, built, and operated by India and put up there by a made-in-India booster stack – hence supported by a society going through a rough equivalent to the early space race in the USA..
• Henry Fountain and his Observatory, bottom of p. 3: Three stories, reported and written with extreme economy of explanation, free of angst, moral uncertainty, or peril. Pared down to the process by which people discover new things and surprise us all:

One Reason Lizards Have Ears: To Eavesdrop;

Greens Get a Boost Under the Glow Of the Supermarket ;

Scientists Propose A More Efficient Way To Make Ethanol ;

Elsewhere the section has stories without the innocence – or lost innocence of an earlier time – of those above. Back to the real world of ambiguity and pain:

• Gina Kolata: Infection Defense May Spur Alzheimer’s; Amyloid plaques are not just visible evidence of Alzheimer’s disease, but are made of a material that seems to have a useful function as an antibiotic. Good story on new discovery but the hed is overdone. Nowhere does Kolata suggest it as very likely that Alzheimer’s results from an over-response to infection. Possible yes, but the main hypothesis arising from this work?, apparently not.
• William J. Broad: For Iran, Enriching Uranium Only Gets Easier ; Pure explainer of some process-engineering facts that are not obvious – why is it centrifuges have such a tough time enriching uranium to a scant 3.7 percent, but go much faster taking that to weapons grade? Broad reduces it to simple terms by inverting the math that instinctively arises in the innocent cranium. It may give some people who are generally favorable toward nuclear power (my hand is raised) a moment’s pause at the prospect of hundreds or thousands of new reactors worldwide cranking out clean electricity.
• Nicholas Wade: Speed Reading DNA May Help Cancer Treatment: The news is important, but this story seems too brief and tight to make it clear. Famous researchers see mitochondrial DNA as big factors in cancer. That’s new, I suppose. But how could it do that? What are the 80 percent of mutated mtDNA strands newly found in some tumors doing to propel division? And how to square mtDNA’s possible central role with what the fourth paragraph says (a marvel of evoking a sense of things without providing any detailed info at all) about chromosomal DNA?
• Yudhijit Bhattacharjee : A Little Black Box to Jog Failing Memory ; The box is the Sensecam. One wears it. It automatically makes a digital photo log of one’s day. The news here is its ancillary usefulness for giving those with fading memory a brain-jogging reminder what they’ve seen lately. The disturbing thing is that this Microsft product’s main market is young people who may use the photos to fill their internet social networking pages. Information overload! Information overload!

As usual, lots more in this regularly amazing section: Whole Thing ;

A few of you out there may have seen a long account Sunday in the New York Times sports section by Alan Schwarz about the overdue recognition of the work of a baseball historian. Her  husband, while alive, refused to acknowledge her as an equal co-author of their superb works – and he was the one who told the publisher what name to put on them. She did love him, was a loyal wife, etc etc. But now…. he’s gone and she’s just getting more and more ticked off. Third banana credit and she didn’t even particularly LIKE baseball (which may have made her the better historian). .

It came to mind this afternoon on discovering, via an automated search that sends me alerts to “science writer” in news stories, a quite lovely little story. It twangs that same synapses, lightly, as did the tale of the contemporary, aggrieved scholar. At Artdaily.org, “The First Art Newspaper on the Net,” is a review of the recent work by an artist in residence at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. The artist’s works now include some inspired by a woman named Mary Treat, a 19th century American naturalist. This review may be a reprinted press release for all I know. It has no byline and seems to pop up, one finds, elsewhere.

Treat wrote, it says here anyway, an influential treatise on beneficial insects and corresponded collaboratively with such stellar scientists as Darwin and Asa Gray.  This evocative line catches the eye: “..the gender divide made it impossible for her to do more than eke out a living as a trustworthy field researcher and published science writer.” That short line seems to say “book!,” except I’m not a book writer so I’ll leave that part to somebody with stick-to-it-iveness.

When I broke into science writing in the early 70s I was immediately struck by this particular trade’s relative gender balance. Initially, as I recall hazily, most of the women were medical (ie “nurturing” and thus in the familiar old mode of sob sister) writers. Even that fuzzy divide has disappeared. Although, one must say, lots of science writers are still eking out livings!

Back to Ms. Treat. She had a lot of company in those days. Books have been written about some of the others. Annie Jump Cannon comes to mind mainly because that’s an unforgettable name. She was a Harvard astronomy employee who’d have qualified for tenure at a young age – she developed the spectral classification system for stars – had the men not  been blind to the possibility. Late in her life she did gain the title “astronomer.” Santa Fe science writer George Johnson a few years ago wrote a whole book, Miss Leavitt’s Stars, about one of Cannon’s contemporaries at Harvard similarly blessed with a triple and wonderful name: Henrietta Swan Leavitt. Her study of variable stars transformed astronomy while she remained a near-cipher in the official journals. It was the way of things back then and is a little bit still, even right here in the USA.

This post written off usual hours, in the late afternoon, after a nap, the mind just drifting along connecting dots as they appear…

Grist for the Mill: Artist Emilie Clark home page;

Pic, by Emilie Clark, BBG-5 , source ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Two weeks ago some newspapers in Spain talked about the British Government proposal to stop public funding on homeopathy, due to the lack of scientific evidences proving its effectiveness. Over the weekend El Pais published an extensive story defending homeopathy practice. The ambitious title is: “homeopathy: science o chimera?”. We argue that in order to tackle this question, one should pay some attention to scientific literature. But strangely, there is not a single reference to research studies. Instead, there is a bunch of mixed opinions from devoted critics and followers. Between them, we find a quote from the 2008 French Nobel Prize Luc Montaignier proposing a mechanism for homeopathy: the molecules of the initial active principles induce electromagnetic vibrations in the water, that stay there after dilutions. No other scientist is asked to confront this suspicious hypothesis. The story seems to be neutral for the first paragraphs, but one can see how it turns into a clear defense of homeopathy, that excludes scientific references against this practice.

En ciencia, el valor de las opiniones es secundario. Cuentan, sin duda; pero cuando existen datos experimentales, ellos son quienes tienen la última palabra.

Por eso, al leer en El País (Esp) el extenso y trabajado reportaje en que Josep Garriga intentaba averiguar si la homeopatía era una ciencia o una quimera, nos hubiera gustado encontrar algo más aparte de opiniones.

Puedes preparar un texto analizando la situación de las prácticas homeopáticas en tu país, o entrevistar a un experto para que te hable de sus investigaciones concretas. Pero si lo que pretendes es responder a la pregunta “Homeopatía: ¿Ciencia o quimera?”, no lo vas a conseguir contrastando opiniones de defensores y detractores. Tienes una herramienta mucho más válida en tus manos: la literatura científica. Si haces una búsqueda en Pubmed con la palabra “homeopathy”, te aparecen 453 reviews y 4042 artículos científicos publicados en revistas de referencia tras superar un proceso de peer review. Ni uno sólo de ellos aparece en el reportaje de El País.

Enseguida continuamos con otros aspectos del artículo –que tiene jugo-, pero el mensaje de este post es muy claro: cuando reportes sobre temas médicos, nuevas terapias, o si el zumo de zanahoria previene la calvicie, no puedes de ninguna manera ignorar la literatura científica. Aquí no estamos contrastando opiniones sobre si una medida política es más justa socialmente que otra, ni buscando ex-futbolistas que opinen si jugó mejor el Barça o el Madrid. Uno de los grandes avances del siglo XX fue la llegada de la Medicina Basada en la Evidencia, cuyo objetivo es utilizar el método científico para analizar de manera objetiva cuales son las prácticas médicas más eficientes en cada situación. Y, sin caer en la arrogancia de menospreciar la experiencia individual e intuiciones de cada médico, o el conocimiento del mundo natural acumulado a base de prueba y error por culturas milenarias, debemos reconocer a la investigación científica como nuestra mejor aliada a la hora de averiguar si una hipótesis es cierta o no.

Regresemos al artículo, porque hay otro aspecto que merece mucho la pena ser comentado: El principio de autoridad tampoco es amigo de la ciencia. Por mucho que un premio Nobel te diga algo, puedes sentirte tranquilo dudando de si se le ha ido la cabeza.

Atención a la cita del premio Nobel Luc Montaignier proponiendo un mecanismo por el que podría actuar la homeopatía: “Se ha observado que ciertas diluciones dentro del agua en las que no queda materia sí registran, en cambio, vibraciones. Esta dilución puede reconstruir la información genética de la materia”. ¿Cuál es el tema aquí? El principio homeopático de las diluciones implica que al final del proceso, en el medicamento no existe ni una molécula de la sustancia que supuestamente te va a curar. Los defensores de la homeopatía no niegan este hecho, y reconocen que no saben qué mecanismo está actuando. Éste es el principal argumento de sus críticos.  Montaignier ganó el premio Nobel por descubrir el virus del Sida hace 27 años, pero su reconocimiento actual como investigador deja mucho que desear. Su propuesta de las vibraciones y la información genética de la materia suena esotérica. Nosotros no vamos a juzgarla, pero tampoco –como hace el artículo- darla por buena sin contrastarla con otro investigador. Como mínimo, deberíamos comprobar si su teoría está publicada en algún artículo científico. El tracker lo ha hecho, y no lo ha encontrado.

No nos extendamos innecesariamente: los primeros párrafos del artículo de el País pretenden mostrar neutralidad, y una predisposición a enfocar el debate de manera objetiva. Pero a medida que uno avanza en el texto, y ve la manera en que están distribuidas las citas de unos y otros, se convierte progresivamente en una defensa de la práctica homeopática. E párrafo final concluye inexorablemente que los medicamentos homeopáticos funcionan, y cada vez hay más médicos recomendándolos. Lástima que no cite un único estudio clínico que lo demuestre, y obvie otros que dicen lo contrario.

Matiz: aquí no juzgamos la validez científica o no de la homeopatía. No es el trabajo del tracker. Seguro que la medicina convencional puede aprender mucho de todo lo que rodea a la práctica de terapias naturales. Pero sí creemos que cuando reportamos temas médicos o científicos de esta magnitud, debemos utilizar siempre publicaciones de referencia además de opiniones de expertos.

- Pere Estupinyà

Two separate stories at BBC, one of the better outlets for following news from the animal conservation front, today with the same meta-theme:

• Two tiger cubs found dead in Indian national park ;
• China herdsmen jailed for killing snow leapard ;

In both cases, one thinks, the government needs to find and offer motives to locals to not kill predators that are tough on the livestock.

This last thought reminds me of  a long and enterprising article that ran the other day in the NYTimes, filed from Indonesia, and that my son-in-law Tom just brought to our attention:

• NYTimes – Peter Gelling: Former Rebels Turned  Forest Rangers in Aceh ;

- Charlie Petit

The Tracker hopes everybody who is following the whirlwind of politics and self-recrimination around and within climate science reads the article on Greenwire by Alex Kaplun that the NYTimes picked up on Friday. The news is that another batch of emails (leaked but not hacked) gives intimate detail on the pain, frustration, and fury among mainstream climate scientists afflicted by the sideshows over IPCC report-fudging and hacked e-mails of the last two months.

The Washington Times’s Stephen Dinan also reported on the same  emails. They were exchanged  among members of the National Academy of Sciences but,  it must be stressed, were not generated by any panel working for the Academy in any official capacity. Dinan selects for examination the  climate change believers’ discussion of buying a newspaper ad to take the fight to the skeptics.

Oh, that’ll work. Newspaper ads, especially in the NYTimes, are so effective in changing the mind of the public at large! Not. A recurring theme of recent weeks is that despite being among the more rational among us, scientists are oddly baffled and helpless when under hostile fire from outside the academy. It gets amplification in this latest bit of email leakage.  The idea is that scientists tend to play fair, and in a fight like this being  fair is what gets you nowhere. McCarthyism comes up.

At his NYTimes-affiliated DotEarth blog Andrew C. Revkin provides links and selected passages from some of the better commentary on the issue.

At Mother Jones Kate Sheppard today reports climate scientists as living in a bunker, with mentality to match. She, as do several others, highlights a quote from old-time environmental researcher and campaigner Paul Ehrlich: “Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentleperson’s debate, we’re in a streetfight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules.” Included here are several pertinent, illustrative links to the blowback the mere discussion of bare-knuckle battle by mainstream climate science is getting from the skeptic’s camp, chiefly this one.

If similar episodes in other fields tell us anything it is that debating the lunatic, the dishonest, and the opportunistic among anti-science groups seldom cures the delusion they promote. Just watch UFO-advocates carve up some innocent astronomer on Larry King Live. Ditto with anti-evolutionists or pro-Nessie arguers. Scientists should stick to science, should say what they think, should not flinch from engagement … but should also recognize that  agents such as environmental advocates and gov’t officials (or news columnists and editorials) may be constitutionally better suited for day-t0-day knife fighting over public opinion and policy.

And science journalists should give their general assignment colleagues a hand by reporting the fray honestly, fully, and with the due diligence to note, prominently, which assertions do and which assertions do not tend to be backed by research that survives such niceties as peer review. The IPCC erred some in that regard. But others err a lot more.

Late Addition:

• USA Today’s Dan Vergano (see comments) reminds me that he reported late last week a poll’s suggestion that scientists are overreacting to all the bad news as significantly eroding the public’s faith in science, climate or general. The piece does a fine job putting the current run of news into longer perspective.

- Charlie Petit

Lots of news over the weekend about sage grouse, aka prairie chickens, but not much that illuminates their problem. Why, exactly, are their numbers plunging?

Last Friday the Interior Department undid a Bush administration ruling that declared the greater sage grouse of America’s western plains and basins in no danger of extinction. But the reversal did not take the next step to list it as threatened or endangered. In a compromise, it put it on a candidate list of species-in-waiting for federal protection. Officially, the feds say other species need attention first. But it also appears that this statutory limbo gives flexibility for various agencies to find ways to have it both ways: permit further natural gas drilling and wind turbine construction etc. but not run the dwindling grouse population a lot further toward zero.

It sounds sensible. It looks also as though AP’s Mead Gruver has a fine roundup of a story, yet  buried a good lede. In the 22nd graf Gruver writes: “Sage grouse are a concern because the birds don’t nest near tall structures such as wind turbines and power lines for fear they could be perches for eagles and other predators.” Sage grouse have been reported on for years as in trouble. But this dramatic turn of events at the Interior Dept merits an explanation why even if that’s been reported before. Gruver’s offhanded remark merits exploration – what do biologists and other specialists say about the birds’ habits that make them seem so sensitive to development?

After all, a mature gas field in sage brush country still has oodles of sage brush around. Ditto for wind farms and most other energy developments. The tall tower line is  interesting. Is it true? What else is lousing things up for the grouse when the workers with rigs, trucks, and pipes and when power lines show up? The real story here has to be whether, plausibly, these birds can or cannot tolerate a modest level of dispersed energy industry in their nesting grounds. The enviros, business investors, and many land owners are sure to disagree. That’s good – conflict organizes any story. The issue needs a hard look.

Other stories:

• AP – Martin Griffith: Nev. wildlife chief questions sage grouse decision ; Shines a spotlight on one sub-population that could get on the official list sooner than most. And the birds’ challenges listed here include, aside from energy development:  cattle grazing, invasive weeds, urbanization, and wildfire (the latter may link to the weed problem, one thinks).
• NYTimes – John M. Broder : No Endangered Status for Plains Bird ; Excellent history on the Bush adminstration’s scandal-scented decision, now reversed, and on this new version as a middle course. It lists residential development as one reason for the decline. That has to knock any ground-nesting bird for a loop – but it’s still not intuitively obvious why energy development does so. The story will be remembered by most readers for one quote from a conservative Utah member of Congress: “The only good place for a sage grouse to be listed is on the menu of a French bistro.” That’s in the same yahoo league as the bumper stickers of a decade or more ago: I like spotted owls – fried! Broder, puckishly, adds further word that the line is ignorant because sage grouse taste awful.
• Bloomberg – Jim Efstathiou Jr.: Sage Grouse Should Get Speceis Protection, U.S. Says ; Another puzzler worth pursuing – this says their habitat acreage is down by half from its pre-Western expansion days, but numbers are down to as few as 10,000 from about 3 million in the 1700s. Why? If bison had half their original range left and nobody was shooting them, there’d be LOTS of them, one ventures.

Here’s a good one, from a smallish regional outlet:

• Gillette News-Record: Steve McManamen – Did we dodge a bullet? ; Written largely to reflect industry perspective, but loaded with detail and insight into how drillers and other developers already face a fairly complex regulatory environment.

Grist for the Mill:

Dept. of Interior Fish & Wildlife Service Press Release ; Fish & Wildife Service Great Sage-Grouse info page.

Bureau of Land Management Sage-Grouse and Sagebrush Conservation ; Lots of links, including to a terrific map of estimated present, and historic, range for the birds ;

- Charlie Petit

It was a good drug, an important drug, maybe the drug. It was the drug that might finally bring Alzheimer’s disease to heel.

A study of Russian subjects published in The Lancet in 2008 found that the drug, dimebon, “significantly improved the clinical course of patients with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s disease.”

“Dimebon shines as Alzheimer’s therapy,” Daniel J. DeNoon of WebMD wrote in July, 2008. He went on to say that the drug “is now only one clinical trial away from approval.”

Turns out, it was a rather large step away from approval. The results of that one remaining study were released last week, and the breathless headlines of the summer of 2008 have now crumbled into dust.

The Wall Street Journal, along with many others, reported last week that dimebon was no more effective than a Cinnabon. (The Journal didn’t put it exactly that way.)

The drug, the Journal said, “failed to meet its primary and secondary goals—improving thinking ability and overall daily function over six months in patients with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s disease,” according to the Journal’s newswire.

Robert Langreth at Forbes went further, dissecting the hype. While the media were parroting the claim that this could be the first drug to slow the course of Alzheimer’s disease, others were suspicious.

From Langreth:

The drug, a former antihistamine sold in Russia, emerged from nowhere a few years ago to become one of the hottest new Alzheimer’s drugs in testing.  The excitement, however, was based virtually entirely on one smallish trial of under 200 patients conducted in Russia. And the  mechanism of action of the drug was murky all along.

“This drug was so hyped,” says USC psychiatrist and Alzheimer’s expert Lon Schneider  “When you look at this drug [chemically] there is nothing particularly special about it.”  He says its tricyclic chemical structure is roughly similar to lots of antihistamines, antidepressants, and antipsychotic drugs.  There is nothing in its structure to  indicate it would have remarkable effect, he argues.

According to Langreth’s story, the drug company Medivation, which was developing the drug with Pfizer, had emphasized that dimebon had an effect on mitochondria, the energy centers inside cells. Schneider didn’t dispute that, but said the drug did other things, too, and that Medivation had pounced on the mitochondria effect and wove a story about how that made the drug a strong candidate to fight Alzheimer’s disease.

Pfizer paid a price for believing the hype; it paid $225 million two years ago for the rights to the drug. The media paid no such price, unless they gave up another shard of their credibility.

Do we hold news organizations responsible for repeating what they were told? That’s a hard call to make two years later. It would have been nice if the initial coverage had been a little more skeptical, even if reporters could not, at the time, find skeptics such as Lon Schneider to give them a different view.

But, as Sam tells Rick in Casablanca, there’s been a lotta water under the bridge since then. The more important question is: What will those same reporters and news organizations do the next time somebody claims to have the first drug to slow the course of Alzheimer’s?

A few others:

Linda A. Johnson at the AP: Pfizer Alzheimer’s disease drug fails in study. Adds the interesting angle that the drug companies plan to continue studies to see whether the drug might work if used differently.

Shari Roan on the Los Angeles Times Health Blog: Another potential Alzheimer’s medication is a bust.

Ewen Callaway on the New Scientist’s Short Sharp Science blog (with apologies, presumably, to Michelle Shocked): Drug flop is blow to immune theory of dementia.

- Paul Raeburn

The superb Covering Health blog operated by the Association of Health Care Journalists pointed me to an unusual experiment being conducted by ProPublica, the foundation-supported, non-profit investigative news site.

For two years, ProPublica reporters Tracy Weber and Charles Ornstein have investigated the handling of disciplinary actions against nurses. It turns out that much of what we’ve read about doctors is also true of nurses–inept nurses continue to do their jobs, those who are disciplined easily find jobs in other states. Some nurses are practicing despite having criminal records.

That’s straight-ahead investigative reporting. It’s what ProPublica was set up to do, if I read the site’s mission statement correctly.

ProPublica’s experiment goes beyond that. Ornstein and Weber have written a comprehensive guide explaining to other reporters how they can use ProPublica’s techniques and reporting to investigate nurses in their own states. The reporters have given away information it took them months to assemble.

But why?

ProPublica execs Paul Steiger and Stephen Engelberg explain in an interesting post that they are trying to establish a new collaborative model for journalism. “We believe that healthy competition among proud journalists brings more news to light,” they write. “But in this era of shrinking resources, there is clearly a role for new forms of collaboration.”

They are pursuing that goal two ways: By giving away reporting tools, as they are doing with the investigation of the nurses. And they have established a volunteer reporting network, through which ProPublica can ask outside reporters for help and those reporters can contribute to investigative projects.

Reporters who want to be alerted when ProPublica has released new reporting tools can sign up for them, and those who want to join the reporting network can do so here.

For more information on this unusual tactic, read Steiger and Engelberg’s Why We’re Giving Away Our Reporting Recipe.

- Paul Raeburn

In some corners the entire edifice of climate change science and the idea that global warming is not only an emergency but our fault is so last century, so passe, so much a mistake if not deliberate fraud. But tell that, it appears today, to the scientists watching methane bubble  in the arctic (or to scientists watching glaciers, watching animal migrations, watching satellite temperature and humidity gradients, watching Hadley cells, watching the thermal soak of the deep sea, watching, watching, watching…).

In Science today a team of researchers reports a steady release of methane from a region called the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, a former tundra and peat wilderness now beneath a  shallow sea. Nobody, apparently, can be positive it hasn’t been doing that for centuries or more, but the signs are not good. Ergo, maybe the acceleration of such releases of this potent gas, a positive feedback forecast by modelers as temperature goes up, is underway.

Or of course, maybe not. That’s the real news here. Maybe not. Most outlets seem to get it right.

Stories:

• New York Times – Cornelia Dean (with Andrew C. Revkin contributing): Study Says Undersea Release of Methane Is Under Way ; Up high in this it says that, while not good news, this “does not suggest imminent climate catastrophe.” Revkin expands on that theme, warning against “tipping point” jeremiads, at his Dot Earth blog. Revkin finds sources saying this is of concern – but it could still be that emissions are no different now than before the industrial age. Interesting place, that newspaper – both writers have taken buyouts from the Times I think, and are off regular payroll for sure. But even those who RETIRE continue writing for it.
• Time Magazine – Michael D. Lemonick: More Warming Worries: Methane from the Arctic ; Nice line – despite all the ‘gates in climate science lately, “They haven’t laid a glove on the science itself,” he writes, with this being one example. You think he’s about to say then that this methane is a klaxon warning that dreadful acceleration of warming is underway. But nope – he writes here that it is not clear at all what this methane emission rate means. Could be ominous – might just be a base line against which future data can be measured.
• Times (UK) Frank Pope: Methane frozen beneath Artic seabed destabilizing, scientists warn; Pope does say there are only “signs” of a destabilizing clathrate deposit about to wreck things, but rides that angle hard – “raising concerns that climatic tipping points may have been reached.” This piece’s tone is considerably more anxious than those in NYTimes or Time Mag. One reason may be the cues provided below in the NSF press release, in Grist, which provided to Pope the quote just cited.
• Christian Science Monitor – Peter N. Spotts: Global warming? Scientists find methane source in Arctic seas ; Worrying, yes, but he writes clearly that whether this is new or not has not been shown conclusively. It’s worthwhile saying that in such stories – because after all the error bars go both ways. It could be much worse than it looks, too.
• Science News – Sid Perkins: Arctic Seafloor a Big Source of Methane ; The pic of bubblin’ plumes just above is from this piece. Perkins leans toward the maybe-bad side of this discovery’s iffiness, noting that these “prodigious plumes” may be part of an acceleration in global warming. The piece is complete for all that. The lead author says here a bit deeper but in plain language: “We don’t know how long it’s been bubbling like this.’
• Much more, but the day is late. Have a good weekend everybody.

*UPDATES:

The news might seem an open invitation to reckless reporting. But is this evidence of a positive feedback to climate warming starting to kick in? Or is it at most an ambiguous but important piece to solving a puzzle – but hardly a bankable sign what that solution is? To the general credit of most reporters who covered it,  most accounts stress the findings’ uncertainty, but do not dismiss the importance of the  data, such as they are, as useful in learning whether this is just the Arctic being the Arctic, or something new. There are exceptions to the general caution.

• Guardian (UK) Environmental Network/ RealClimate: Is Arctic methane on the move? ; The liberal newspaper here gives wider circulation to this influential blog’s reaction, with this post from a University of Chicago ocean chemist.  It’s message : Good data, useful for baseline, no way to know what the history is of the Siberian shelf’s methane release. Ergo, not much here to hang a news handle on. Link to original RealClimate post.
• Telegraph – Geoffrey Lean: Methane from frozen seabeds culd accelerate global warming, new research suggests ; Here’s a lesson: Just because one knows which newspaper in the UK is conservative and which is liberal does not mean you can be positive how news will get reported at either. The Telegraph leans right, including a tilt to the skeptical side of global warming as a reason to remake the world’s economy. But Lean, an oldtimer, writes with emphatic suggestion in his lede: ” It may just be one of the most ominous bits of evidence yet that global warming could run out of control.” That it may not be is implicit here – not that most readers will notice. In the sixth graf, Lean writes “It is far too early to draw firm conclusions from the findings…only a tiny amount of methane has been released so far.” So why call it maybe the most ominous sign? The solid evidence is that CO2 is going up and we did it. Temperatures are going up and CO2 is with high certainty the culprit. Ergo things look ominous for sure. Not for sure catastrophic, but sure enough to take serious measures. One does not need methane to make the case for that.
• The Atlantic Magazine ; Nicole Allan : Siberian Methane Could Fast-Track Global Warming: Allan’s sole interpreter of this news is Joe Romm via his blogsite ClimateProgress. Romm is an influential man and among the most vigorous at seeing the worst possible climate case as the most sensible one to embrace. Considering what is at stake that may be wise but he’s a relentless campaigner. Romm’s Post on the methane is hardly the most authoritative analysis of these bubblin’ plumes.
• LATimes Greenspace (Blog) Margot Roosevelt: Methane seeps rise from Siberian sea shelves ; Roosevelt makes the case that this IS a sign of positive feedback. Not even a line to acknowledge that the history of the specific emissions in the report is not known – rather, these recent observations are wrapped into a summary of rising methane levels worldwide. Roosevelt has filed previously from Alaska on methane worries. This latest is not a news report. It is an argument.

Grist for the Mill: NSF Press Release ; Univ. Alaska-Fairbanks Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Science News’s ace reporter on astrophysics and cosmology, Ron Cowen, has out this week on line, and in the print issue as well,  under the head HOGAN’s NOISE, a most ambitious piece.

Its topic is a brand of mathematically abstract speculative cosmology and pure physics that is not only difficult to describe, but exceedingly short on data. If you think I mean string theory, nice guess, but it’s not that well-worn punching bag.

Cowen examines one respected theorist’s conviction, if not many converts to it, that the universe is in some sense a hologram. And that interference patterns of its finest details are writ largely enough, and distributed widely enough, to be interpreted.

Cowen wisely starts off with a parallel – a literary allusion (from Dr. Seuss) on the ability of big enough crowds of very small things to make enough noise that a very large thing named Horton might hear them. His topic is the potential detection of the itty bitty domains into which some theory divides space and time. On the the geometrical side of this duality it comes to “one ten-trillionth of a trillionth the diameter of a hydrogen atom,” or10^-35 meters. Cowen’s protagonist believes that with the right sort of interferometer, a jitter or sort of noise might show up in the machine’s spectra that confirm such an irreducible unit of spacetime.

I have checked. Every word of this piece is plain English, or plain enough for a non quantum-physics specialist to understand. But I am afraid that I get lost between the definition of what a hologram is, and how the Schrodinger wave interferences among the teeny domains not only share information instantly across space but produce a signal that can be compared to noise.

I think what we have here is illustration of the greatest fear of generally well-qualified science writers who are nonetheless lay people trying to talk to other lay people. Which is that some of the things that get scientists in certain abstracted fields the most deliriously excited don’t survive, even in their essence, translation to words and concepts that the reporter fully grasps. And even if he or she does, that can be made familiar in the space of one article. Metaphors and analogies can help, can often be equally exciting as the most arcane topics, they may capture the spirit of things, but they seldom deliver the precise new information that has dazzled a colloquium’s front-row participants.

Plus, to me a hologram is a pattern on a photosensitive surface. It is left there by the the split arms of a laser beam – one of which reflects off some object and the other bounces among good mirrors and through good lenses. After they merge again their interference fringes and such, if hit again by such a laser beam, project a reconstruction of the 3-D object’s appearance. But that kind of holography is not helping me understand what kind of hologram the universe is supposed to be – do we live in the interference pattern, the reconstructed “virtual” image, or the real thing?

Nonetheless, the story is worth reading. Cowen is a dedicated reporter with a nose for where his beat’s gems are to be found. It says here that this line of work could lead to the reconciliation of relativity and quantum mechanics. Issues of remote causality are in play. Just knowing such work exists is worth it. I just wish I GOT it.

How many old timers out there remember the fuss over Stephen Wolfram’s fat book A New Kind of Science? It said the universe is a computer program. I read the book; it’s still on my shelf with a forest of sticky notes jutting from it. I wrote about it.  I did not understand it. I thought I could, but I just couldn’t.

- Charlie Petit

It’s taken a long time, but looks like geologist Walter Alvarez and his colleagues, who included his late father and Nobelist Luis Alvarez, at UC Berkeley, have a stellar exhibit with which to assert they’ve finally carried the day. Their big falling rock and not something else like volcanoes did in  T. rex and Triceratops and whatever other big dinosaurs were alive 65 million years ago or so. A huge international team, publishing today in Science. agrees it was an asteroid striking near Central America that ended the age of these terrible lizards and left huge niches for us mammals (and those little flying dinos a.k.a. birds) to radiate into. It’s already a standard in textbooks but this damps the maybes.

Stories:

• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman : Settled: Dinosaurs done in by asteroid ; This is the kind of balance that makes sense. Perlman in his lede and hed tips readers off to which stance is firmest now, but also provides fairly extensive reply bya die-hard Deccan Traps volcanic cataclysm believer. No other reporter appears to have called any killer-volcanism proponents for a reaction.  It’s a local story for Perlman, a sory the paper has been covering for more than 30 years (more on that after the story list, below).
• Los Angeles Times – Thomas H. Maugh II: Scientists settle on single-asteroid hit as culprit in dinosaurs’ demise ; In a term he borrows from a source, Maugh calls the review panel a “dream team”. His lede: “It’s official.” Maugh might want to reconsider writing that the KT dying “has been called the greatest extinction event of all time.” It must be true that it’s been called that, but maybe not truly. It has also been said a lot that the earlier Permian extinction was far more extensive. But in the space he has, Maugh provides a good, succinct rundown of this controversy’s history.
• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Scientists conclude asteroid, not volcanoes, wiped out dinosaurs ; USA Today includes a non-scientific poll of readers to make their own opinions known.

*Correction re Vergano Article: By implication it was included among those I say in this post had no word from the pr0-volcanic exctinction school. Just such an objector is quoted in this one. I regret the oversight and error./ cp

• AP: Researchers reassert that impact killed dinosaurs; No byline. Perhaps the wire’s editors feel that this new news is not so newsy. By now, after all, that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs is close to cliche. This perhaps is why NYTimes didn’t cover it?
• Scientific American – Katherine Harmon: A theory Set in Stone: An Asteroid Killed the Dinosaurs, After All ; Fine description here of the immediate, awful repercussions of the impact around the globe.
• Guardian – Vikram Dodd: Dinosaurs were killed off by Isle of Wight-Sized asteroid, scientists say / After studyng 20 years of data, panel of 41 scientists rule out volcanic explosions as cause of dinosaurs’ demise ; Good one: the conclusion “will sound more than just a bit familiar to most schoolchildren who paid attention in science class.”
• BBC – Paul Rincon: Dinosaur extinction link to crater confirmed ; Hmmm. This says the results were discussed at the Lunar and Planetary Conference in Texas. A glance at the program doesn’t show it, but must be true.  That’s where Rincon has been this week.
• Space.com – Leonard David: “Rock-solid’ case: Asteroid killed the dinosaurs  / Scientists say the debate over cause of the ancient catastrophe is settled ; David, too, is at the Lunar and Planetary Conference – and notes that it was at this meeting that actual scar of hte impact, at Chicxulub in Mexico, was first made public.
• Times (UK) Mark Henderson : Huge asteroid impact did spell the end for dinosaurs, experts say ;
• Telegraph (UK) Richard Alleyne: Dinosaurs wiped out by asteroid impact that turned earth into a ‘hellish’ place ;
• Daily Mail – David Derbyshire : Dinosaurs WERE wiped out by an asteroid crashing into Earth ; It’s unclear whether this story benefited from calls to authors to check quotes and get more from the authors beyond what is in press releases. However, as is common at the Mail, the story on line is lavish with a variety of illustration.
• … could do more…

I have some satisfaction at this, by the way. As a professional reporter, I do try to maintain disinterested objectivity. But when one gets a semi-scoop, it’s hard not to feel a fondness for the prospect it might actually be, you know … true. On May 29, 1979, I wrote a front page story for the San Francisco Chronicle on the astounding conclusion, presented at an American Geophysical Union meeting in Washington DC, that most likely an asteroid impact or just possibly a nearby supernova explosion – something from space at any rate – killed the dinosaurs. I had gotten word of it earlier and spent a lot of time preparing. The Chronicle was not alone in print the day the news broke,  but had held it to honor the embargo. Ours was the biggest package in the media right out of the gate. The wires had it, the NY Times had a piece derived I think (no byline anyway) from wires, and several other outlets did too. A bit later, during the first week of January, 1980, the team followed it up in San Francisco at the AAAS meeting by saying they’d taken the supernova off their list of culprits. But the asteroid with its telltale trace of iridium  was their declared, top candidate  for the KT extinction all along.

Coverage generally dates the debate to 1980 and the AAAS presentation plus publication in Science, but that’s not right. It’s May, 1979. I just re-read the old clip to be sure. And if you’re curious, a scholar of science writing has put together a bibliography, here, giving dates of other pubs that year in both press and technical literature.

Grist for the Mill:

• NSF Press Release ; U. Texas – Austin Press Release ; Imperial College London Press Release ; UC San Diego Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

After years of discussion between governments, scientists, industry and NGO’s the genetically modified potato variety “Amflora” has been approved (by the European Commission) for planting in Europe. The potato is equipped with a special starch mixture minimizing amylose to get more of the industrially important amylopectin, which is used for paper production, e.g.

That’s the basic news – and it’s quite important for Germans, who still eat 36 kilogram (79 pounds) potatoes per year per capita (mostly fresh, not processed in french fries).

Stern.de (Nina Bublitz) wrote a comment on this, with the headline: “Why are we allowed to hate the GM potato”. Hate is a strong word, and in my view not appropriate, but the author does not use the word again in the article, which is well-balanced. The main question raised in the article is, why consumers should be happy about a potato, which does not come with any advantage for them, personally, but with the risk, that normal potatoes might be mixed up with a few of these GM potatoes. The article explains, too, what the risk is: Amflora comes with an antibiotic resistance gene (due to the genetic modification technique), which might be transferred to bacteria pathogenic for humans, making them impossible to treat. Also important: The article is cautious about using numbers distributed by organizations supporting GM crops. Which is not the case with the comment of the Welt, where the reader asks himself, whether the number of 134 million hectar GM-crops is high or low, rising or shrinking? And what does it mean, that “60 percent of all food in a supermarket comes with genetically engineered ingredients”? Where does this number come from? And what about the difference of ingredients made with the help of some biotechnology and transgenic organisms? But the Welt did much better than the Rheinische Post, whose comment obviously lacks any research or biological knowledge basis.

The local newspaper  Rheinpfalz (first) and the nationwide Financial Times Deutschland had a piece yesterday, which looked more into the future: There are more GM potatoes to come. First, another amylopectin variety for industrial usage. But “at the end of the year” BASF, the chemistry company from Ludwigshafen, plans to file for approval of the variety “Fortuna”, which is resistant to a common root disease of the plant. Different to Amflora, Fortuna is not restricted to industrial usage but targeted to the regular consumer market. It will reduce pesticide usage but – again – won’t have any advantage for the consumer (see FAZ with the dpa piece here).

The Märkische Allgemeine (published in a rural region of Germany with lots of potato agriculture) asked local starch producers, who said, that they do not want to use the GM potatoes (“We need it like a hole in the head”), because they already use potatoes with high amylopectin concentrations. Interesting, but the authors did not explain, that Amflora contains solely amylopectin and why this is an advantage for the industrial processes.

Zeit.de (Dagny Lüdemann) Q&A-piece with lots of potato history.

Also: IT started in Germany…

Within its science section Zeit.online has a sphere for history, sometimes quite boring, but  this piece about the inventor of the computer (from Hellmut Vensky) is interesting and amusing (and I assume it is not a coincidence, that it has been published right at the start of the international computer fair CeBit in Hannover). The article describes Herman Hollerith, a German inventor, who actually got his inspiration for using punch cards to automate the US population census from watching train conductors. He was the one, who first used electricity and a 1/0-code (electricity flow/no flow). His machines and company built the foundation of IBM. An article without quotes and no actual need to be published, but just fun to read for people, who would like to know how the invention of such an incredibly complicated thing on their desktop or lap could get started. (The article did not forget to mention, that Holleriths company and machines helped organizing the Nazi-regime and the holocaust.)

- Sascha Karberg