In a long Sunday feature the Times's...
In a long Sunday feature the Times's Celia W. Dugger reports from Nepal on that country's rapid progress toward defeating measles, a disease that still kills 450,000 children a year, she writes, yet can be beaten. It has been virtually eradicated from the Western Hemisphere by vaccination campaigns. More of today's deaths are in India than anywhere else, she writes. There, public health programs focus on polio. But in neighboring Nepal an anti-measles program pushed largely by volunteer teams of village women is working wonders. The story is mostly human interest, with plenty of vivid reporting from the countryside, but it carries a solid core describing how public health campaigns can...
In a piece with a good sense of how weather scientists adjust their computer models to cleave closer to reality, The Sun's longtime weather writer Frank D. Roylance reports...
In a piece with a good sense of how weather scientists adjust their computer models to cleave closer to reality, The Sun's longtime weather writer Frank D. Roylance reports on recent modeling runs with a National Weather Service program called SLOSH that show how, if everything goes just wrong, a large hurricane making landfall near Maryland could send an 18-foot storm surge into Baltimore. The story describes well how weather researchers recalibrated and updated the model's algorithms, or whatever its guts are called, in light of surprising high runups of water from smaller remnants of a recent hurricane that brushed the area a few years back.
Also, for a bonus,...
The Washington Post's Guy Gugliotta, on Fri and Sat, has two updates on that headache called the Space Transportation System, or shuttle. The first is about the jam NASA is in with the program. It is hemorrhaging...
The Washington Post's Guy Gugliotta, on Fri and Sat, has two updates on that headache called the Space Transportation System, or shuttle. The first is about the jam NASA is in with the program. It is hemorrhaging money but it is NASA's unavoidable political burden to fix it so that the under-performing space station can be completed before it, too, is abandoned; and breaking news about the agency's determination that, flawed or not, it is still aiming to fly the shuttle Discovery in July. Not really much science in these, The Tracker thinks, but the space program is after all on the science beat. Actually, people in space suits are inspiring, but they also achieve inverse science, if you will. Even NASA's boss is conceding that as shuttle costs rise, money drains from real science programs such as probes to far off planets.
Read...
The Sacramento Bee's Chris Bowman and Elizabeth Hume report a new American Lung Association report that ranks the nation's bad air...
The Sacramento Bee's Chris Bowman and Elizabeth Hume report a new American Lung Association report that ranks the nation's bad air regions and says the San Joaquin Valley-it is the southern half of the state's big central valley and its main cities include Bakersfield and Fresno-has for the first time beaten the Los Angeles basin to the south as the nation's smoggiest place. Prominent sources of pollution are the region's flatulent, belching dairy cows. The local smog board is working on regulations, they report. However, a glance at the lung assoc. report itself gives the impression, counting ozone and particulates, that LA and the San Joaquin Valley are pretty much nip and tuck for the foulest air.
...
By deleting about 15 percent of the genes from E. Coli bacteria, a University of Wisconsin-Madison geneticist and his colleagues have produced a variant that is more easily manipulated in the lab and may find wide uses in the biotech industry, reports the Journal Sentinel's Susanne Rust. Possible...
By deleting about 15 percent of the genes from E. Coli bacteria, a University of Wisconsin-Madison geneticist and his colleagues have produced a variant that is more easily manipulated in the lab and may find wide uses in the biotech industry, reports the Journal Sentinel's Susanne Rust. Possible payoffs, she writes, could include new vaccines or other therapies. It is an informative story but may have mentioned higher than the very last sentence the commercial side: the university's alumni research foundation holds the patent, and has licensed its use to the lead researcher's company. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it is intriguing.
UW-Madison Press Release
The Journal Sentinel's Don Behn and Katharine Goodloe not only report the nesting of two eagles along the Milwaukee River in a region where none have...
The Journal Sentinel's Don Behn and Katharine Goodloe not only report the nesting of two eagles along the Milwaukee River in a region where none have been seen in a long time, they provide a pretty good summary of the drastic decline, and recent return, of eagles across much of Wisconsin.
A small comet with the hefty name 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, and which is breaking into pieces and appears near demise, will pass within about 5.5 million miles of Earth May 12, reports the LA Times's...
A small comet with the hefty name 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, and which is breaking into pieces and appears near demise, will pass within about 5.5 million miles of Earth May 12, reports the LA Times's John Johnson Jr, or 20 times farther away than the moon. But a press release from Johns Hopkins Univ's Applied Physics Lab says the distance will be 7.3 million miles, or 30 times the moon's distance, as does a second from the European Space Agency (although it gives it metrically, as 11.7 million km). Johnson is outnumbered, The Tracker thinks. Either way, the distance, while posing no threat, is relatively close as comet passages go.
Johns Hopkins Univ...
After a week of delays for weather and technical glitches, a Boeing Delta II rocket roared up from the California coast early Friday morning to deliver two sophisticated satellites into orbit to...
After a week of delays for weather and technical glitches, a Boeing Delta II rocket roared up from the California coast early Friday morning to deliver two sophisticated satellites into orbit to start giving clouds an examination more thorough inside and out than ever before possible. The satellites, a NASA probe called CloudSat and a French-American companion named Calipso, become the fourth and fifth members of the so-called A-Train, a caravan of satellites that follow one another almost nose to tail in a path crossing the north and south poles. They are expected to fill many holes in theories of the exact physics governing weather and climate.
Stories: AP; Washington Post...
After seven years of construction a giant machine, the Spallation Neutron Source, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee spat a beam of neutrons down its maw, the first smidgeon among lots...
After seven years of construction a giant machine, the Spallation Neutron Source, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee spat a beam of neutrons down its maw, the first smidgeon among lots more to come. High energy neutrons as they scatter and carom among atomic nuclei give scientists a superb tool for deducing internal structures of metals, crystals. plastics, and many other substances. The AP's Duncan Mansfield reports that leaders of the project expect great things from the machine, but that it will take a few more years to get it fully up to speed. When it's done it will be by far the world's most powerful neutron source.
The ORNL's website on the machine is...
Some intriguing clinical trials out of Africa, reported by the New York Times's Sharon LaFraniere, based in South Africa, suggest that circumcision of men can cut the risk of acquiring or transmitting AIDS. Uncircumcised men, according to a collection of earlier studies, are more than twice as...
Some intriguing clinical trials out of Africa, reported by the New York Times's Sharon LaFraniere, based in South Africa, suggest that circumcision of men can cut the risk of acquiring or transmitting AIDS. Uncircumcised men, according to a collection of earlier studies, are more than twice as likely to become infected as their uncut brothers. A newer study suggests a risk reduction of about two-thirds. A WHO report, it says here, may be out in June, and if the practice gains the agency's support, that could go a long way toward pushing the procedure in southern Africa, where it has been relatively uncommon. The Times story is reasoned and reasonable, explaining that cells on the underside of the foreskin are prime targets for the virus and that abrasions there invite infection.
Read it...
The controversy over Kennewick Man, a 9,400-year-old skeleton found in Washington State in 1996, led many to imagine that currently living Native Americans routinely object to scientific study of their...
The controversy over Kennewick Man, a 9,400-year-old skeleton found in Washington State in 1996, led many to imagine that currently living Native Americans routinely object to scientific study of their supposed ancestors' remains and demand they be reburied. The Times's Sandi Doughton makes clear this is not the case. She reports that a number of other human remains of comparable and even greater antiquity are in labs and yielding information with no controversy.
Among the obvious findings: Some Old Folks were boaters. On Santa Rosa Island off Southern California, for example, anthropologists found the remains of a woman who lived some 13,000 years ago. On an Alaskan island others found human bones dated to 10,300 years ago. Even in those days of lower sea levels, it would have taken boats and boating skills to get there.
Doughton, capitalizing...
US officials say he committed "the biggest military computer hack of all time." He says he just wanted to know if the government had records of UFOs and space aliens. This ain't a science story. It isn't even a technology story, but somehow it appeals.
A British man says he was inspired by the movie "War...
US officials say he committed "the biggest military computer hack of all time." He says he just wanted to know if the government had records of UFOs and space aliens. This ain't a science story. It isn't even a technology story, but somehow it appeals.
A British man says he was inspired by the movie "War Games" and the idea that computer savvy kids could hack their way into top secret military computers. So he tried it and, over two years, explored computers at the Pentagon, NASA headquarters and the Johnson Space Center. US officials say he caused $700,000 worth of damage and crippled defense systems right after Sept. 11, 2001.
28Apr 2006
A family history of heart disease is always a cause for concern but, according to a new report presented Thursday in an AMA media briefing in New York, your mother's status matters more for you than your father's. The study was based on Swedish records which, as we all know by now, are much better than are kept in...
A family history of heart disease is always a cause for concern but, according to a new report presented Thursday in an AMA media briefing in New York, your mother's status matters more for you than your father's. The study was based on Swedish records which, as we all know by now, are much better than are kept in the US. Lee Bowman of Scripps Howard News Service was among the first to get his story on the wire.
Read it.
The news release from the AMA concludes with what is becoming obligatory in medical industry promotion, a disclosure or, in this case, a disclaimer of conflicts of interest. It says, the researcher "has no...
For some reason this survey of sexual satisfaction among women aged 40 to 69 made at least 17 smaller news outlets (as documented by Google News) but, it appears, no big daily. The study, a survey of some 2100 California women found that three-fourths of them are sexually active and two-thirds are at least somewhat...
For some reason this survey of sexual satisfaction among women aged 40 to 69 made at least 17 smaller news outlets (as documented by Google News) but, it appears, no big daily. The study, a survey of some 2100 California women found that three-fourths of them are sexually active and two-thirds are at least somewhat satisfied with their sex lives. On balance, that was offered as good news. The study was done at the University of Arizona at Tucson and published in the April issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology. Here's the journal article.
The Reuters version of the story dominated such American outlets as the Jackson News...
The Times's Dennis Overbye listened to a panel from the National Academy of Sciences yesterday and reports American physics is at a crossroads and in crisis. With money drying up for...
The Times's Dennis Overbye listened to a panel from the National Academy of Sciences yesterday and reports American physics is at a crossroads and in crisis. With money drying up for adventurous new machines in the US, many fields are withering, the panelists said, urging that if the US does not angle to get the next generation of high energy particle physics linear colliders built here, America's physicists will have even more reason than they already do to go overseas for the boldest experiments. Because fundamental physics discovery is often the catalyst for invention and ultimate industrial vigor, the panel adds, failure to invest in it will erode "the economic and cultural vitality of the United States." That is disturbing but only the NY Times, as far as The Tracker can find among daily news outlets, covered the well-promoted news...
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