Charlie Petit's Tracker

It's been seven years since the conservative Canadian government led by prime minister Stephen Harper started to put muzzles on  federal employees who stray from the script when talking to the media. This prominently includes scientists and other researchers who might have opinions on interesting things, such as the nation's energy policies, wildlife and land management, climate trends, medical research priorities, and some things that are interesting just because they are interesting including odd animal behavior or astronomy or autocratic psychological syndromes.

   Nonetheless it remains a shock every time when reading again how deeply into its government institutions has penetratede the fervor to put barriers between scientists and reporters or other members of the public. Knight trackers have of course taken note of the disarray in scientists' freedom to talk directly with the Canadia public before (including posts by Deb Blum (...

As regular tracker readers surely all know, something is killing off honey bees across large stretches of the world including North America and Europe. Nobody has shown overwhelming evidence of a specific reason for this die-back, aka colony collapse disorder. But agricultural commissioners in the European Union moved this week against one of the prime suspects: a class of pesticides used widely on crops. Farmers soon, if this sticks, will have a hard time getting permits to use these "neonicotinoid" formulations on crops that attract the world's most common pollinating livestock.

   The expected  ban is not as sweeping as some agri-environmentalists hoped and lacked a strong enough vote to be open-ended in time, therefore is to be in force for two years. It  fits generally under the precautionary principle - a tenet of low-risk living. It has more adherents in European governing circles than in those of the US. It means better safe than...

  Raindrops keep falling and the next thing you know the neighborhood is full of water and deputies in boats are yelling "evacuate!" It's always good to get that warning sooner than that. The sequestration as illustration of America's legislative face-plant got attention today (Thur Apr 25) from the Associated Press. Its prolific science writer Seth Borenstein highlighted an announcement from the US Geological Survey that budget cuts appear poised to force closure of many stream and river gauges nationwide. About 100 of these these automated sentinels are located where they are vital if communities, farmers, and others are to get warning of flooding and thus reduce loss of life and of property damage. Particularly in the flatter parts of this country where flood plains can reach well into or clean across riverside towns, not to...

  Dark Matter hit the news this week for the second time recently - hot on the heels of another  suggestive but hardly conclusive report (see earlier posts Nov. 17, 2010 and just the other day, April 8, 2013 )  on data from the International Space Station and its alpha magnetic spectrometer team led by MIT physicist Sam Ting.

   This time the hints of WIMPs, or Weakly Interactive Massive Particles, is detection of three cosmic something or others that kicked their way through the deeply chilled silicon and germanium crystals of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search. The CDMS detector's builders tucked it into the Soudan Mine underground laboratory in Minnesota. The newest one is often called Super CDMS, as it has better crystals than the...

  Here's a switch on the usual cute critter story. While perhaps nothing is cuter than a newborn fawn gangly-hopping along beside its mother unless it is twin newborn fawns, one West Coast newspaper writer forthrightly celebrates them with a thought other than awww, lookit that.

• SF Chronicle - Tom Stienstra: Fawns are food for predators in 2013.

  Stienstra, who looks a lot like an old-time Rocky Mountain fur trading man, is the Chronicle's outdoors writer. He puts words down in a deliberately manly way. He also is as romantic as anybody about the soul-filling blessings of a solitary, meditative walk through the wild and is often rapturous upon spotting its native residents. One is unsure what the animal rights and PETA crowd generally will make of this piece. The story riffs off his recent encounter, at...

  For decades energy and environment writers have been reporting on the eco-dreamers who hope and plan for a time when renewable, distributed energy and its frugal use brings low-carbon gigawattage to the nation's homes, factories, and mega-malls. That means solar panels, heat pumps hooked to buried thermal buffers, ultra-efficient buildings, bio-diesel and electric cars, wind farms all over the place and other greenie stuff making for a robust, resilient, and not-Earth-destroying way to get some real work done around here. And while a national grid would presumably still be useful, power blackouts would not take down as much. Lots of businesses and communities could keep their lights on with gizmos of their own.

   The serious, gray people scoffed. Was it Dick Cheney who said such things may boost one's sense of personal virtue but are no way to run a profitable economy? That, the perceived wisdom had it, takes coal and oil, as always. Well, nuclear...

   Sam Ting to the rescue of an intellectual legacy for ISS?

   For years - since well before 1998 when the International Space Station finally started coming together in orbit thanks to heroic work by  engineers and astronauts - many including yours truly have scoffed at it as a waste of money. Just to design and build it (marvelous USA Today graphic) cost around $100 billion. I can't lay hands on the operating budget, but it cannot be small. It's a waste, at least, if one scores it on scientific merit rather than as a display of mostly-US aerospace engineering prowess and dominance. Just maybe, the worm is turning. Not that this complex of solar panels, pressurized modules, and docking ports for space freighters devoted mostly to keeping a few people alive inside to run the place will go down as an entirely sensible investment. But even if automated...