Chagrin and admission: I got so engrossed in old crocodiles and maize and other things that I ran out of time to gather up another news gusher that I had on the list. Science magazine and an article on the demise of mammoths and mastadons garnered a good deal of press attention. I’ll try to catch up on all that Monday.

- Charlie Petit

I just finished writing a post (next one down) on new news that reads like old news, on old news that some take as new news (the croc one below that), and here’s another on new news that feels like same old same old, but is not. The genome for corn, aka maize, is done and is now published in journals. A genome, one thinks. Hmmm. Corn huh? Well whoop de doo. But one story was enough to assure The Tracker that this one really is worth special note.

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

It’s happened before and it’s happening again – at the CERN laboratory in catacombs carved ‘neath the French-Swiss border, the Large Hadron Collider is on the short countdown toward loading up on protons and antiprotons and smashing them into one another at relativistic velocity. It could be underway within a day or so.

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

Peter Gleick (rhymes with click) is a water and resource specialist at an outfit in California called the Pacific Institute where for many years he’s been a solid source for reporters wanting new detail about how mankind is messing things up – particularly via a changed climate’s impact on natural hydrology. (He is also, by the by, younger brother to well known science writer James G). This  week NPR, via an interview with Renee Montagne on Morning Edition, gave Gleick a chance to say something optimistic and somewhat admiring about our collective behavior. Led by reforms in industry and agriculture, US water consumption per person, if not in absolute numbers, has dropped considerably in recent decades.And this despite the move by so many people to the Southwest to buy big sunny houses and to plant large lawns with big sprinkler systems.

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

The Tracker was tempted to get a bit snarky this morning as, once again, the National Geographic Society and it’s fave showman peleontologist, monster fossil digger upper Paul Sereno of the U. of Chicago, have choreographed a flood of publicity for its own magazine article plus TV special on scary dead and vanished things.

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

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) After ten years  following more than 40.000 people a study in Spain concludes that moderate, high and even very high consumption of alcohol is associated with less coronary heart disease in men (but not women). It’s not a study with mice and the methodology seems good enough to report about it. But…. how does the alcohol intake correlate with other ailments? The study didn’t look at that. Who published it? A magazine with an impact factor under 5. What do outsite experts tell journalists about the study? That it has limitations. Conclusion: better keep this research within academic circles. And don’t give way to temptations to encourage alcohol consumption as the path to a healthy heart.

“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 of HealthDay reports this morning, in a story on the US News website, that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said American women should ”keep doing what you’ve been doing for years — talk to your doctor about your individual history, ask questions, and make the decision that is right for you.”

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

The last few days a lot of news outlets have buzzed about NASA’s Mars Rover, Spirit, one of her six wheels long lame and all of them now hub deep or deeper in the Columbia Hills that the machine has dutifully explored for five years. Managers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have been unable to figure a successful extrication strategy for months now and are making last, desperate attempts. An alternative is to leave Spirit, or the Spirit, as a parked weather station.

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

At Science News astro-reporter Ron Cowen has out a well-described, if obscure, slice of news from deep space. He reports on new data, some of it just recently lurking about on the astro-ph arXiv pre-publication website, describing discovery that the long-studied microquasar, Cygnus X-3, makes gamma ray bursts along with other long-known ructions. This in turn may help explain the physics of an object that acts a bit like a quasar – those things in galactic hearts that betray supermassive black holes – but probably is at heart merely a very busy neutron star or stellar mass black hole.

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

A reader* tips me to a remarkable little video and little story on news that first broke on what, in most of the world, are among the more obscure news feeds. In Indonesian waters a Japanese aquarium’s expedition, running a remotely controlled submersible, caught a glimpse of a very small and young, blue, spotted, coelecanth swimming calmly across a rocky sea floor. It’s just about the size of a decent trout. Adults are more like groupers. Quite nice.

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

Kudos to TIME Magazine’s headline: Are the Earth’s Oceans Hitting their Carbon Cap? which manages to be clever, funny, trendy, and disturbing at once. Its Bryan Walsh is among several reporters who relay news from the journal Nature that the acceleration by oceans in sopping up fossil carbon has lost pace with the rate at which fossil carbon is rising in the atmosphere. For decades, this carbon sink’s efficiency had stayed roughly constant but a team led by a Columbia – Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory researcher says it recently appears to be flagging. That’s not good for climate forecasts – it means a bigger percentage of CO2 emissions are lately staying in the air. At least, perhaps, ocean acidification won’t arrive as intensely and soon as otherwise, one thinks.

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

Gad. The big TV we bought about five years ago for the family room would soon be illegal were it still for sale in the stores. I just went and looked at the user manual. That 42-inch Sony LCD sucks 210 watts of power when on (and 2 when on standby) and that doesn’t even count the cable box and the gizmo that sends signals to my headset so my dumb half-deaf ears can tell my dumb brain what people are saying. That’s about 30 more than new regulations adopted by the California Energy Commission will permit.

Any time bureaucrats decide to regulate popular consumer products out of the molds into which free enterprise has put them (as in gas mileage, incandenscent bulbs, freon in AC and fridges, paint on toys, seatbelts, finials on cribs, machine guns at the hunting gear emporium, against foam cups that really are sort of dumb laws, etc.) it’s news. Somebody celebrates, somebody gnashes teeth. Same this time around.

One news angle in California’s case ought to be the pretty good track record by the energy commission. Its mandated efficiency standards on other appliances, manufacturing practices, building codes (as in insulation and double-paned windows), etc. have flat-lined per capita electrical consumption for the state for 30 years while usage has gone up and up for the nation as a whole. We got richer, on average, too. Anyway, it says here that TVs like the one in Mr. and Mrs. Trackers’ family room will need to draw 183 watts or fewer (less? My usage instinct just went blank) in 2011 and 115 watts four years later. Really giant TVs are exempt for awhile from new regs – they’re rare and are usually used in theater-type or sportsbar settings where, I suppose,  the usage per set of eyeballs merits some slack.

It’s front page on some California news papers, but it made national news, too. Fool around with people’s TV sets? That’s a story. But chances are that private enterprise (a slightly different thing than free enterprise) will meet the guv’mint’s challenge – after a requisite spell of complaint. That’s the thing about the way CA regulates electricity and consumer products – our power rates are higher than average but we use so little, our bills are lower than average. So far so good. Needless to say I’m a big, smug, ain’t-we-smart fan of the Energy Commission. The EPA and DOE should have had such courage.

Let’s see how many stories provide a good taste of the back story, the one about how well these chamber-of-commerce ruffling moves have worked out before.

California Stories:

• LA Times – Marc Lifsher, Andrea Chang: California approves new standards on energy-hungry TVs ; It calls the reduction a “slash” in TV power. The term “nanny government” arises. So also do word that this alone will save residents $8 billion from utility bills, and generalities on the merits of efficiency.  And at the end, a bit on how well such strategies have already paid off. A Times blogger, Jon Healy,  also provides Regulating TVs – who wins, who loses? The paper, it says there, editorialized against the regs. One downside – it may take longer to get 3-D TVs that satisfy the new rules.
• San Jose Mercury News – Dana Hull: California adopts first-in-nation rules to cut energy use by new TVs ; After spending time with sources proud of the move, it picks an angry quote from the Consumer Electronics Assoc: “..dangerous for the California economy, dangerous for technological innovation, and dangerous for consumer freedom.” (Freedom on the line? Fox TV’s Glenn Back – excoriated in the current New Yorker – and tea parties are sure to muster to that.) Sums up at the end with a roundup of past payoffs for such moves, and notes other states that are mulling adoption of similar standards.
• Sacramento Bee – Jim Downing: Televisions must use less energy, California regulators tell makers ; This one puts industry’s skepticism first, but says chances of reversal are slim. The governor is firmly on board and most TVs now on sale, it says here, meet the 2011 specs. The story does not, however, have much on the payoff from such practices previously (and a topic, one must add, that the Bee has covered extensively over the years).
• Meanwhile, from a redder portion of a blue-tinged state, this op-ed: Imperial Valley Press: Our Opinion: Forget TVs, work on the budget ;

National Press:

• NY Times – Clifford Krauss : California Imposes Rule for Efficiency on Some TVs ; Mentions California’s regulatory energy history prominently, and calls new regulation perhaps the “most challenging to consumers’ tastes.” One might counter with the state’s lead in demanding, back in the 70s, smog-squelching catalytic converters. Until auto engineers got smarter, that rule turned once-mighty car models into acceleration dweebs and consumers howled.
• Wall St. Journal – Rebecca Smith: New California Rules to Make TVs Greener ; Not long, with nothing on CA’s history of such market interventions and how it’s gone so far.
• AP – Samantha Young – Calif. requires TVs to be more energy-efficient ; Very brief mention of regulatory history, results.
• Reuters – Timothy B. Hurst : California Bans Sale of Energy-Guzzling Plasma TVs ; Plasma TVs are the least efficient, but one is unsure that it’s necessary to single them out in the hed. The piece, by the way, is circulated by Reauters on is wire, but also credited to Ecopolitology.com.*
• USA Today – David Lieberman : California requires TVs to be more energy-efficient in 2011 ;
• PC World – Jacqueline Emigh: California Bans Power-Hungry TVs: Critics Blast Regulation ; Piece is balanced, despite the hed, in its treatment of the pros and cons. However, nothing on past efficienty regs’ impacts.

Grist for the Mill:

Consumer Electronics Association Press Release ;

CA Energy Commission Press Release ;

* Ecopolitology.com – I was unsure what that is. Seems at quick glance to be an activist but well-done enviro news service. It also led me by random walk to a persuasive take-down of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s opposition to the windfarm proposed for Nantucket Sound:

• Cape Cod Today – Carl Freeman: Local Public Radio station becomes a forum for RFK Jr. distortion ;

One gets the idea pretty clearly, and this is not to pick on my local paper the San Francisco Chronicle or Kelly Zito, who reports today on Amtrak Locomotive No. 2015 and its new pollution control equipment. But…right in the second paragraph it says without equivocation that the engine has “a nearly 50 percent reduction in diesel exhaust” and, a bit later, that this is thanks to new “power assemblies, water pumps, and radiators.”

I wasn’t there. Maybe its fuel mileage has just doubled. More likely however is that the new gear actually cut its efficiency a tiny bit – meaning more CO2 in the air – while removing dangerous soot, heavy metals, dangerous radicals, and other minor but nasty components of this diesel’s exhaust. So one very strongly suspects it is still diesel exhaust but it is not such dirty diesel exhaust -  and there might well be a bit more of it than before.

Terminology and literal meanings of words do matter.

Nice looking engine in any case.

- Charlie Petit

The Washington Post’s Kari Lydersen has this week a good example of those old bromides about unintended consequences when good intentions are realized. The news is that some US industries – the example is plants that produce chlorine – have turned from processes that rely on the heavy and toxic metal mercury. Regulators told them they must. So they are cleaner and emit less of it into the air and water.

The downside is that in just this one industry hundreds of  tons of mercury, obtained for the old way of doing business, are now available and may make their way to the global market. Mercury is particularly sought in developing but resource-rich nations. One reason is gold miners who use it in a crude process for separating the precious metal from ore. The result can be serious health threats to workers in the gold industry and heavy pollution of local environments. The Tracker, as it happens, has visited dragas – or dredges – on the Madeira River in Brazil and seen that very process wreathing workers’ heads in mercury-contaminated vapors, and performed not particularly carefully on the decks of the boats as waste spilled overboard. (A terrific photo essay on such activity, at the same place I visited, is here.)

The Post’s story is a solid walk through some of the perils and general difficulties of regulating pollution. Plus, it provides another irony. While the regulations do limit the quantity of Hg getting into the air and water, the amounts are dwarfed by mercury unleashed from coal during combustion and, in developing nations without mandatory scrubbers on stacks, rising into the sky.

See Also:

• Chemical and Engineering News – Cheryl Hoque (Jun 15): Mercury Purge / Congress is moving legislation to outlaw mercury-cell chlorine plants.

Pic: source, an Olin chlor-alkali plant.

- Charlie Petit

Well, yet another another challenge for industries that make and rely heavily on plastics. Just a week ago this site posted on a study of factory workers in China linking male reproductive problems to exposure to bisphenol-A. This week its twin poster child for plasticizer worries, the molecular family called phthalates, is a suspect for making little boys a little less likely to do stereotypical little boy things – like play fight, wave toy guns, or glomm onto toy trucks and trains.The news, based on a report in the International Journal of Andrology,  has been spreading for several days now, and has been covered by many outlets.

The study, reported the LA Times’s Thomas H. Maugh II three days ago on line, is from team led by a University of Rochester group that has previously reported an association between exposure to these plastic softener agents and subtle changes in the size and anatomy of boys’ genitals. The new study, he reports, is small (it was funded in part by the EPA and NIH). Women were tested for phthalates in their tissues (via urine assay) during pregancy, followed a few years later by questions about their children’s play habits. There was no association between exposure levels and girls’ play, but boys – it says here – tended to be less interested in rough and tumble play and other male-associated patterns at higher exposures.

The study involved 145 preschool children. However, the Times and other news outlets tend not to provide any numbers on how big a shift occurred or how many boys displayed it. Such number are not to be seen in the press release either.

Other stories:

• Science News – Janet Raloff: Plastics Ingredients Could Make A Boy’s Play Less Masculine ; No specific numbers to back up the trend, either. But she has an important bit of news: a much larger study is in the works.
• HealthDay News – Randy Dotinga: Could Plastics Chemicals ‘Feminize’ Boys’ Play / Small study suggests a link, but others question a connection ; Ah, a number. It says the masculinity metric in the questionnaire’s structure was 8 percent lower in mothers with the highest level of phthalates than in those with the lowest. But how many women were in those categories is not revealed here.
• US News & World Report – Ford Vox: In his On Men column with the hed Pthalates Threat: Less Boy, More Girl, , the doctor-medical writer draws perspective from both last week’s BPA news and this week’s study. And this latest, he writes, is so small a study it “isn’t as worrisome as the headlines suggest.” But if it convinces more mothers to avoid processed food while pregnant, he writes, that’s good for other reasons. This account is quite detailed, and provides a bit more on that 8 percent difference. It’s evidence, yes, he writes, but nothing has yet proven that phthalates cause permanent effects in people at exposure levels common in the environment.
• WebMD – Kathleen Doheny : Phthalates Affect Way Young Boys Play ;
• TIME Magazine – Tiffany Sharples O’Callaghan: Can plastic chemicals cause effeminate behavior in boys? ;
• NY Daily News – Rosemary Black: Study: Chemicals in plastic can make boys act more like girls ;
• Kansas City Star – Matthew Schofield : Are the chemicals in plastics making our boys less boy-ish?;
• Toronto Star – Cathal Kelly: Does exposure to plastics make boys less masculine? ;
• Daily Mail (UK) David Derbyshire: Chemicals used in plastic feminise the brains of little boys ’so that they avoid rough and tumble games’ ; Sheesh. Overkill hed. Less rough and tumble doesn’t mean none, not to speak of the inherent uncertainty in a small study. Story’s text is similarly eager to look on the “disturbing” side of the report.
• for the record department – Plastics and Rubber Weekly (UK) Barry Copping: BPF skeptical on US phthalate study ; BPF is the British Plastics Federation.

Grist for the Mill: University of Rochester Med. Ctr. Press Release ;

Pic source on Flickr.

- Charlie Petit

Dueling headlines? AP’s Seth Borenstein reports a rise in CO2 under the hed, Led by China, Carbon Pollution up Despite Economy ; Over at Reuters, David Fogarty writes a different tale, Global CO2 emissions to drop 2.8 pct in ‘o9: report. Borenstein’s angle is that even as the global recession began to bite last year, China’s new fleets of wind turbines were blowing in breezes of rising CO2 due mainly to China’s fleets of new coal fired power plants. Fogarty’s is that nope, CO2 is falling due to that same global recession.

Confusion may be one result of such seeming inconsistency. Yet it’s not, it appears, a contradiction. The stories agree on a larger and more important underlying truth: whatever blip the recession causes, CO2’s trend is relentlessly up. It is accelerating into territory that, as seen in other stories below, has a few reporters horrified. Developing nations, led by China with India nearly as important, are the main drivers of that increase.

Both stem largely from a report in Nature Geoscience from dozens of authors, led by researchers at the UK’s Univ. of East Anglia, US’s Oak Ridge Nat’l Laboratory, and other institutions working under the aegis of The Global Carbon Project. At the same time, the Global Carbon Project issued a separate briefing paper aimed largely at delegations heading for next month’s Copenhagen meeting. Reporters got briefings in London, Australia, and New Zealand. Its overall message was on the long term rise in CO2, but included data showing that in 2008 the increase over the level in 2007 could largely be attributed to emissions in China. But the researchers also say that this year, with the recession more intense, emissions will drop a bit. The Tracker would go with the forecast drop this year – it’s newsier, sounds like a welcome turn of events in a bad time, would pull readers in, and then let’s them have it with the bigger, bad news that our atmospheric blanket is getting toastier all the time, alas.

That data block upper right, distributed by AP, does show that despite China’s continued growth last year many nations, led by the US, were already throttling their factories and power plants back as economic activity ebbed.

Other stories:

• Telegraph (UK) Louise Gray: Pollution increases as world loses its ability to absorb carbon dioxide ; This may be a better angle than either Reuters or AP took – the carbon sinks are getting clogged. Plus in a second story stemming from the same report, she has Climate Change: temperature to increase 6C by end of century.  Gad.
• Independent (UK) Steve Connor, Michael McCarthy: World on course for catastrophic 6°Rise ;
• Independent (UK) Steve Connor (comment): Climate change is like a disaster in slow motion ; The paper’s science writer does an op-ed. He is dismayed and perhaps disgusted by political hob-nobbing while the world turns on the roasting spit.
• Sydney Morning Herald – Marian Wilkinson: Jump in coal use pushes emissions to all-time high ;
• Times (UK) Ben Webster: Greenhouse gas emissions study highlights need for tighter national targets ;
• Canwest News Service (Canada) Margaret Munro: Emissions per capita at ‘all-time high’: Report.

Grist for the Mill:

University of East Anglia Press Release ; Univ. of Bristol Press Release (on real contradictions in recent news) ;  Global Climate Project Brief for Policy Makers.

Sort of related, contrapuntal green energy news that may momentarily take one’s mind off the atmosphere’s catastrophe:

• NYTimes – Kate Galbreath: After Outcry, 2 companies shift their turbine plans ; A report on the fine-grained, business-motivate ties between Chinese and American wind power moguls, and what politics and public opinion can do to their plans.
• USA Today – Julie Schmit: Controversial wind farm to build turbine plant in USA. Ditto.

- Charlie Petit

According to a study presented Monday at the American Heart Association’s annual meeting, “heart disease patients who practice TM [Transcendental Meditation] have almost 50% lower rates of heart attacks, stroke and deaths compared to similar patients who don’t practice meditation.” That’s from Shari Roan on the Los Angeles Times blog, Booster Shots.

I bet you can guess where I’m going with this. That 50 percent drop represents what–100 heart attacks in the control group and 50 in the meditators? Or two in the control group, and one in the meditators? Roan doesn’t say.

I wasn’t at the heart association meeting this year, so I went to the press release from the Medical College of Wisconsin. There I found the following bullet point: “A 47 percent reduction in the combination of death, heart attacks, and strokes in the participants.” But no actual numbers. (While I’m at it, why say “almost 50%,” as Roan did, when 47% is more accurate–and shorter?)

Roan also backs into her story, beginning by telling us that TM is one of the most studied meditation techniques, and the new work adds to the evidence that it’s helpful. But she never tells us what those earlier studies said. She does include a few words on a separate study that found TM-associated reductions in blood pressure in college students.

There is no evidence that she interviewed anyone from either study. She evidently rewrote the releases. That might be excusable for a blogger who lives on 50-cent refills and free wireless at Starbuck’s, but it’s hard to justify from the LA Times.

Jue Wang of the AAAS news service ScienceNow provided more detail on the study, but still did not say how many heart attacks and strokes occurred in the experimental group and control group. Wang did helpfully include comment from others who were apparently not involved in the research.

Most other news outlets ignored it. The story has only scattered presence on Google health news. I’m not terribly surprised by that. I suspect fewer news organizations are sending reporters to the heart association in these difficult financial times. And perhaps many science and medical reporters were too cynical and skeptical to spend time on this, especially while they are swamped with mammography this week.

But this study was done with a $3.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. That’s a lot of money, and we should be paying attention to how it’s spent. Besides, this seems to be a legit study, and it offers hope of a relatively easy and inexpensive way to prevent a lot of heart disease. At this moment, the Congressional Budget Office is calculating the costs of health reform. Shouldn’t we be reporting on research that could potentially affect those costs?

- Paul Raeburn

Grist: Medical College of Wisconsin press release; Maharishi University of Management release.

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Many Spanish language newspapers have mentioned controversy in US about guidelines proposing to postpone mammograms from 40 to 50 years old. Only a few have included data about the situation in their own countries. One exception is found in Spain, where recommendations have already been to start screening at 50 (for the low risk population), and do it every 2 years.

Ayer todos los medios estadounidenses discutían la polémica recomendación de que las mujeres sin antecedentes familiares de cáncer de mama, retrasen el inicio de sus mamografías a los 50 años. El papel de expertos que realizó el informe aseguró empezar a los 40 años es innecesario, y puede ser contraproducente. La sociedad americana del cáncer se ha posicionado en contra de esta recomendación, argumentando que la detección temprana es la mejor arma contra el cáncer. En Infobae se puede leer un buen resumen, y algunos otros medios han tomado notas de agencias o realizado traducciones. ¿Traducciones? ¿No merece una noticia como ésta incluir, al menos, unas líneas sobre la situación específica en el país? Obvio que sí, y algunos periódicos lo han hecho, pero muchos menos de lo que sería deseable .

La mejor pieza la firma MJ Pérez – Barco “El dilema de las mamografías”, en ABC (Esp). Explica la polémica en EEUU, y que en España las autoridades sanitarias ya aconsejaban empezar los controles a partir de los 50 años, salvo que se detecten antes problemas. Para no confundir al lector, el artículo muy bien empieza con un tajante “Entre los oncólogos y autoridades sanitarias españolas no hay lugar a dudas: la mamografía es la prueba diagnóstica más eficaz para detectar precozmente la aparición de un cáncer de mama”. Luego se puntualiza que quizás o es necesario empezar tan pronto como a los 40 años, y que la verdadera preocupación en España es que el 30% de las mujeres mayores de 50 años no se hacen mamografías, a pesar de ser el tumor más frecuente en España. Muy buena reacción de MJ Pérez a la noticia de EEUU, incluyendo declaraciones de expertos españoles.

La Voz de Galicia titula “El último informe sobre las mamografías da la razón a España respecto a la selección de edad”, en un artículo que concluye: “Antes de los 50 años, el pecho de la mujer es más denso y por tanto la mamografía resulta menos útil en estos casos, pues da muchos falsos positivos que solo se aclaran a través de las estresantes biopsias”.

El Mundo (Esp), por medio de Laura Tardío ofrece muy completo artículo en el que recomienda las mamografías cada dos años, también para evitar falsos positivos que conduzcan a biopsias innecesarias.

La Nación (Argentina) traduce el artículo del New York Times, y añade una nota diciendo que en Argentina se recomiendo empezar las mamografías a los 40 años, y los expertos locales opinan que debe continuar así, para evitar que la detección llegue tarde.

La Nación (Paraguay) da un buen resumen del estudio y la polémica. No ofrece demasiados detalles sobre su país, pero transmite que su Ministerio de Salud apuesta por la detección precoz.

En El Periódico (Guatemala) Diana Choc preguntó a un experto local cuya opinión difiere de las estadounidenses, y una radióloga que incluso aconseja empezarlas a los 35 años.

El Espectador (Colombia) se salta la controversia y titula directamente “Recomiendan hacer menos mamografías” en su espacio “Vivir”. Ni siquiera cita las voces contrarias a la recomendación de retrasar las mamografías, y transmite a sus lectoras un peligroso mensaje.

El Nacional (Venezuela) también utiliza sólo agencias, pero por lo menos incluye las opiniones contrarias, balancea muy bien la información, y cita una frase que El Espectador debería haber considerado, (y que sin duda hizo MJ Pérez de ABC a tenor del inicio de su artículo): “Lo que nos preocupa es que, como resultado de esa confusión, las mujeres opten por no someterse nunca a las mamografías. Y eso, para mí, sería un problema grave”

– Pere Estupinyà

A month ago, Gina Kolata had an exclusive front-page story in The New York Times saying that the American Cancer Society was secretly revising its guidelines on screening for breast and prostate cancer. As I noted in a post at the time, the American Cancer Society denied any such stealth plan.

Kolata’s exclusive, at least regarding breast cancer, now looks misguided. The government’s announcement this week that women in their 40s should no longer get mammograms has provoked widespread controversy and argument.

But contrary to what Kolata predicted, the American Cancer Society has not changed its guidelines. It has vigorously defended them.

Meanwhile, the news is full of predictable reaction stories this morning–nobody much likes the new guidelines. The Washington Post instead produced a very nice piece putting the controversy in context. Who remembered that the same recommendation was proposed in 1997, with similar consequences? Kudos to Dan Eggen and Rob Stein.

- Paul Raeburn

Do you know whether women in their 40s should have routine mammograms? A lot of our colleagues think they do.

Tuesday’s papers carried stories on new guidelines issued by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force that suggest that women in their 40s should no longer have routine mammograms, that women over 50 should have mammograms every two years, not annually, and that women should no longer be encouraged to examine their own breasts.

It’s not the last word on the subject; the American Cancer Society, among others, disagrees. As with most things in science, certainty is elusive, so researchers do the best they can with the evidence they have.

Some reporters and writers are not nearly so careful.

On the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, medical correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton summarizes the findings and throws around statistics, but she prejudices her story from the start. The news is wrapped around the story of a 42-year-old woman whose cancer was caught early by a routine mammogram, and who pleads with doctors not to throw away this useful tool. Ashton did not show us a woman who endured months or years of uncertainty and turmoil because of a false positive.

If that weren’t enough, Ashton goes rogue and tells us herself that the guidelines are bunk. ”As a medical professional,” she tells Couric, “I can understand the statistical thinking …but I think I’m going to have a hard time recommending that they don’t get screening.”

At Forbes, Mary Ellen Egan also knows better than the experts. In a piece headlined “Breast Cancer Screening: The Wrong Message,” she calls the guidelines “a dangerous precedent.” Sure, screening in women in their 40s might not save many lives, she writes, but “what if you’re that one woman whose life is spared? What if that one woman is your wife, your mother or your daughter?”

Adam Tschorn, in a Los Angeles Times blog, tells us where to buy $14.99 T-shirts protesting the new guidelines, and gives us this: “Anyone who has suffered through breast cancer — or had a loved one who has — will probably tell you that performing 1,900 preventive mammograms to save the life of one woman isn’t too big a hurdle.” Any word from the 1,900 who had mammograms for nothing, some of whom tearfully–and wrongly–told their husbands and children they had cancer? Not from Tschorn.

I’m not arguing against opinion pieces, or saying that we shouldn’t be able to discuss the pros and cons of the new guidelines in our copy. But this isn’t the way to do it.

For an example of a ruminative, personal piece that works well, check out the excellent blog post by Deborah Kotz on the US News website. Kotz turns 40 next year, and she wonders, in the post, whether she should get a mammogram. She notes that the American Cancer Society disagrees with the new guidelines. She informs her speculation with reporting, and concludes with “we have a complex decision to make about when to start mammography—40 or 50? I’m still uncertain, though I’m leaning towards waiting.” She’s tentative in her conclusion, and she never claims to know more than the people she’s interviewing.

Others:

David Olmos of Bloomberg tells it straight: “Annual mammograms for most women in their 40s have more drawbacks than benefits, said a panel of U.S. doctors that recommended women wait until age 50 to start getting breast cancer screening tests every two years.”

Liz Szabo at USA Today: “Most women don’t need to get mammograms until they reach age 50, according to a controversial new report that recommends that far fewer women undergo the breast cancer screenings.”

Alice Park at Time: “Most women don’t need to get mammograms until they reach age 50, according to a controversial new report that recommends that far fewer women undergo the breast cancer screenings.”

Julie Steenhuysen at Reuters: “Sweeping new U.S. breast cancer guidelines released on Monday recommend against routine mammograms for women in their 40s, but several groups immediately rebelled against the recommendations.”

- Paul Raeburn