The twin-barrelled strategy for dealing with global warming has for decades not only included mitigation, as in not emitting nearly so much greenhouse gas, but also adaptation by armoring, retreating, economizing, and broadly learning to live on an increasingly unfit planet. For most of that time mitigation...
Charlie Petit's Tracker
The twin-barrelled strategy for dealing with global warming has for decades not only included mitigation, as in not emitting nearly so much greenhouse gas, but also adaptation by armoring, retreating, economizing, and broadly learning to live on an increasingly unfit planet. For most of that time mitigation got top billing from technical experts and the general media. Many have felt that a spotlight on adaptation is a perilous step toward resignation, surrender, and steep decline for our species along with many of the rest of them here with us.
But it gives the trend toward adaptation a big stamp of approval when a leading science writer at the world's most dominant news agency presents a reflective piece on the slow pivot of recent years to it as the only thing that national governments seem willing to endorse. The message: with so many nations too paralyzed to take tough, low-carbon paths, the best bet for a quick and sane response is welter...
You heard, did you not, that China this week docked a Shenzhou capsule with a woman and two men on board to a small living habitat, a cramped space station named Tiangong 1 about the same size as the Shenzhou? The station's name by the way means "Heavenly Palace." While this cramped cylinder is...
You heard, did you not, that China this week docked a Shenzhou capsule with a woman and two men on board to a small living habitat, a cramped space station named Tiangong 1 about the same size as the Shenzhou? The station's name by the way means "Heavenly Palace." While this cramped cylinder is no palace China has ambitions to build a larger, Skylab-class space station by about 2020. The first Tiangong crew won't stay long. They are due back in a week and a half.This mission is a somewhat longer replay of a docking and crew return last year. China is practicing for something a lot bigger.
One of the punchier stories is in Time Magazine, where veteran newsman and science writer Michael D. Lemonick got the news up under a fine hed, "Beijing, We Have a Space Program." It's more essay than news account, and thus gets some...
A stroke of happenstance while cruising the usual sites led yesterday morning to an impressive piece of writing. My question was, is it an impressive piece of reporting? That turns out to be yes. Here also is an example that, sometimes, an assignment that seems to be falling apart turns out to be doing the...
A stroke of happenstance while cruising the usual sites led yesterday morning to an impressive piece of writing. My question was, is it an impressive piece of reporting? That turns out to be yes. Here also is an example that, sometimes, an assignment that seems to be falling apart turns out to be doing the reporter (if not the sources) a favor. More on that in a moment. First take in this evocative, melancholy, uplifting, woeful tale of dedication, war, nature, science, and resilience:
- The Crux (Discover Mag-hosted blog) Kenneth Miller: Researcher Studying Endangered Elephants Flees Central African Republic; The story starts slightly ambiguously, propelled by a first sentence rich in immediate, mysterious peril. The border guards, wary of advancing rebels,...
(ALERT - Longish post. If you don't have time to read it all be sure to skip to the video linked at the bottom. Which is, by the way, a long thing too. The reward is a fabulous, ear-scorchingly effective rant on GMO-phobia).
With anti-GMO campaigns and truth-in-GM...
(ALERT - Longish post. If you don't have time to read it all be sure to skip to the video linked at the bottom. Which is, by the way, a long thing too. The reward is a fabulous, ear-scorchingly effective rant on GMO-phobia).
With anti-GMO campaigns and truth-in-GM labeling drives putting so much wind in eco-activist sails, the UK's busiest newspaper (eg - its large New York bureau's scoop on who told on the NSA and revealed its appetite for private phone records) late last week ran a terrific story. In it is a sober and sharp explanation why one ought not to be quick to condemn things for sale in the market just because a few genes got switched in the lab from one species to another. I am unsure whether this ran in the printed paper or just on a website:
- Guardian/Professional - Marc Gunther: ...
I gotta take a look at Ria Novosti more often. Past, brief glances at the English language products of this Russian news agency left an impression it's after the same sort of audience as the Daily Mail in the UK, with the same relationship with truth and perspective. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it has revamped...
I gotta take a look at Ria Novosti more often. Past, brief glances at the English language products of this Russian news agency left an impression it's after the same sort of audience as the Daily Mail in the UK, with the same relationship with truth and perspective. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it has revamped things. Maybe both. Maybe I mixed it up with pravda.ru (which really is odd, as see this lunatic rant on its page today). Check out RIA Novosti's science home page. It looks reasonably reasonable with some but not too many extravagant flourishes and the likes of !!!!! in heds. As an old aviation buff I was amazed to read there that the Pentagon is buying 30 Russian Mi-17 military transport helicopters from their state-...
Lots of people love wine. Anything new that explores deeply the artisanship and ancient history of viticulture and winemaking - and better yet that involves some solid science- can be expected to make news.
But I am stumped in one regard. A Balthazar-sized load of wine stories flowed...
Lots of people love wine. Anything new that explores deeply the artisanship and ancient history of viticulture and winemaking - and better yet that involves some solid science- can be expected to make news.
But I am stumped in one regard. A Balthazar-sized load of wine stories flowed today after a University of Pennsylvania-led team published in PNAS its analysis of some amphoras about 2500 years old. Archeologists excavated them from an apparent mercantile storeroom at an ancient port site called Lattara in France south of Montpellier. Evaporative deposits in their narrow bottoms carry strong evidence that wine once filled them. The site carries broader evidence of wine-making including remnants of vineyards and stone platforms suitable for stomping grapes into juice. A major focus of the PNAS paper is that the amphoras are made in the style of the Etruscan culture - which scholars already know for its winemaking - in what we now call Italy. The...
Covering the environment comes with a sensible presumption that most stories will be about fights over regulations, about threats to this or that species (including humans and their health), pollution, and other unpleasantries and bad trends. Once in awhile however a reporter comes upon something that seems...
Covering the environment comes with a sensible presumption that most stories will be about fights over regulations, about threats to this or that species (including humans and their health), pollution, and other unpleasantries and bad trends. Once in awhile however a reporter comes upon something that seems to be turning out better than feared. Such as, we have our bald eagles back! But what needs a turn for the better in the public image department than the northern snakehead? The big scaly immigrant, native to China, was all over the news a few years ago. It was condemned as a dreadful mischief maker and decimator of North American ecosystems. It is ugly to boot. It can crawl right out of the water and flip flop across the road if it needs to get to the other side, breathing air the whole while. Then, there's the slime...
We would still be a lot better without them but here's a switch.
- Reuters - Deborah Zabarenko:...
A little google news search routine that triggers on the word "geologist" and alerts me by email doesn't often pay off, but it came up this morning with a tremendous diversion. It also provides an intriguing lead that surely could take somebody to an interesting and larger feature.
- ...
A little google news search routine that triggers on the word "geologist" and alerts me by email doesn't often pay off, but it came up this morning with a tremendous diversion. It also provides an intriguing lead that surely could take somebody to an interesting and larger feature.
- Jakarta Post - Hans David Tampubolon: RI was home to Atlantis, says geologist ; The story comes with the above illus, whose full caption is 'Needle in a haystack: A field worker sifts through what is left of an ancient structure at the Gunung Padang megalithic site, about 60 kilometers southwest of Cianjur, West Java. The structure, which many believe was older than the Egyptian pyramids, has been used as evidence that an advanced civilization had existed...
Just read this for a superb example of what a news agency can do when pulling out all the multi-media stops. The product is called Firestorm. It is a full-on documentary...
Just read this for a superb example of what a news agency can do when pulling out all the multi-media stops. The product is called Firestorm. It is a full-on documentary film made for optimal on line viewing. The UK's Guardian has it up. It clearly was not cheap - the credits start with writer Jon Henley and go on to list 20 more editors, designers, video and sound specialists, and researchers plus outside agencies that provided archival and other photos.
The story is gripping, and made the news when it unfolded last year in January, the height of the southern hemisphere's summer. It's too bad computers and tablet and such don't provide smell-o-vision and other atmospheric carriers of information. Little is lacking here save for the hot blast of a superheated day, one's hair ruffled by...
One cannot blame press agents too much for slipping in a lure such as "missing link" into an astrophysics news release on the formation of a big messy galaxy from the collision of two more orderly ones. A good enough reason is to grab the attention of reporters who might do some more reporting. What the p...
One cannot blame press agents too much for slipping in a lure such as "missing link" into an astrophysics news release on the formation of a big messy galaxy from the collision of two more orderly ones. A good enough reason is to grab the attention of reporters who might do some more reporting. What the p.r. person needs from reporters is that they stop to read a given release. Fine reporters, once hooked, ought to rethink the verbiage and to get a few more lines of information before writing it up. Alas, many press releases are regurgitated intact by lesser news agencies (and a few huge outlets), and the releases are posted by parent institutions eagerly as a window into their good works. It is lamentable, if no felony, that such flaccid yet sensationalistic writing of science news makes it so easily to the general public. But one hopes the better outlets re-report the stories from scratch.
To back up just a bit, your tracker received a tip from...
There surely will be an inquiry into the apparent demise of the epochally successful Kepler spacecraft's ability to look fixedly at one place in the sky. For nearly four years it has examined a specific spangle of stars. Its gargantuan data stream revealed peculiar, slight dimmings that fit what should...
There surely will be an inquiry into the apparent demise of the epochally successful Kepler spacecraft's ability to look fixedly at one place in the sky. For nearly four years it has examined a specific spangle of stars. Its gargantuan data stream revealed peculiar, slight dimmings that fit what should happen when planets have crossed their disks as seen from our vantage point. It's already hit pay dirt with the best seeming to come and now, pffffft. More on the inevitable post-mortem in a moment. First a summary and a roundup of media accounts.
News started circulating about a week ago that the 1.1-ton spacecraft had put itself into safe mode. It has had a recent history of doing that but this one looks a lot worse. One of three operating reaction wheels had already given up the ghost. The craft started with four of them spinning like tops, including a backup. Now down to two of them, the Kepler planet-finding factory cannot point the big...
This is not a news story but it got my mind into a perplexed state. That is, until I realized it might be that the question is not the right question the American ear wants to hear:
- The Curious Wavefunction (Scientific American Blogs) - Ashutosh Jogalekar...
This is not a news story but it got my mind into a perplexed state. That is, until I realized it might be that the question is not the right question the American ear wants to hear:
- The Curious Wavefunction (Scientific American Blogs) - Ashutosh Jogalekar: Who's the greatest American physicist in history?
The writer is a chemist with a biotech company in Massachusetts. His blog site is serious and sober. This essay on top US physicists is worth reading mainly because his personal answer is a name few of us in the ksjtracker community, even the physics writers, have ever heard of and even those who have won't likely have much to say. But its muscle comes from noting that while the list of illustrious American-born physicists is pretty long (...
Nothing like an alert editor and an enterprising reporter on hand to get the jump on an interesting, if not Earth-shaking in either metaphorical or actual meaning, excloo for one's outlet.
Here it is in two outlets, its primary publisher first and one that picked it up with full attribution...
Nothing like an alert editor and an enterprising reporter on hand to get the jump on an interesting, if not Earth-shaking in either metaphorical or actual meaning, excloo for one's outlet.
Here it is in two outlets, its primary publisher first and one that picked it up with full attribution
- Nature (News and Comment) Richard A. Lovett: Polar Wander linked to climate change / Melting ice in Greenland may have helped to shift the location of the North Pole ; and at Scientific American: Climate change Has Shifted the Locations of Earth's North and South Poles ;
The news: A paper is now in the accepted-for-publication queue at Geophysical Research...
With atmospheric CO2 bouncing along at the 400 ppm milestone, a level not seen in the geologic record for millions of years, a new report from a host of mainly European institutes called the Ice2sea consortium provides a timely additional news peg - a newly refined estimate of the range of likely sea level...
With atmospheric CO2 bouncing along at the 400 ppm milestone, a level not seen in the geologic record for millions of years, a new report from a host of mainly European institutes called the Ice2sea consortium provides a timely additional news peg - a newly refined estimate of the range of likely sea level rise for the rest of the century.
In a welcome development the press has widely varied first-reactions to the news. This is good. To see the press thinking for itself - it does happen often but not as often or as incisively as is should - is better than reading stories all taken slavishly from a limited number of press releases. On the other hand, the disparity in some cases is marked. Perhaps it is that reporters are making too much of a rather narrowly focussed report that extrapolated new, modified global numbers from an analysis of the behavior of glaciers on Greenland and Antarctica as they debouch from their fjords into the sea. It may also be that...
Kaching! That's the sound of science - everywhere in the world. Basic discoveries with no obvious material benefit have often led to vast acceleration of innovation and economic productivity in the longer run . But what's happening in Canada may be short circuiting things while the governing party professes...
Kaching! That's the sound of science - everywhere in the world. Basic discoveries with no obvious material benefit have often led to vast acceleration of innovation and economic productivity in the longer run . But what's happening in Canada may be short circuiting things while the governing party professes to be trying to make them better. Thank you Phil Plait, of the Bad Astronomy blog at the Slate site, for pointing it out. Read his post in full, because Plait puts it as well as anybody could. KSJTracker will do its part by gathering up some examples of how Canada's media played this development last week.
But the short version is that the conservative gov't in Ottawa, via its National Research Council, will concentrate its in-house science budget on bottom-line...
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