Charlie Petit's Tracker

This is sort of creepy, evoking slightly images from that recent movie I didn't see but I saw the trailers: Rise of the Planet of the Apes. You know, virus-vectored, genetically altered chimps and gorillas planning a takeover. Its imagery of primate skullduggery came to mind while reading on the AP Seth Borenstein's review of recent research on the differences and similarities between how people and apes think. It covers such fundamentals as ability to consider themselves as individuals and to empathize or somehow recognize similar volitional intellects...

For three years now it has been illegal for hunters or anybody else shooting at wildlife within sanctuaries for California condors to use ammunition that contains lead. Steel, tungsten, copper, depleted uranium for all  I know, are ok . But a new study in the Proceedings of the Nat'l Academy of Sciences finds that many of the carrion-eating birds are still carrying chronic, dangerous quantities in their blood streams. Maybe it's old bullets still finding their way into the environment (pehaps in animals that got shot but lived on..) and more likely the inevitable poachers, land-owners, or others who didn't get the word on lead or don't care. Nobody...

Tracker notice

Head Tracker Charlie Petit will be semi-retiring from the KSJ Tracker beginning August 3, completing more than six years at the helm. From the beginning, the Tracker has been a hit with science writers. Its substantial overall readership increases year by year.

Much of the success of the Tracker, I think, comes from Charlie’s unusual abilities as a blogger. He has a sharp eye for interesting material, a sense of skepticism, a light touch as a writer and a continuously-present sense of humor. To my mind, this combination of traits goes a long way to defining the essentials needed for a good blog. Unlike more formal journalism, blogs have a personal voice. But it must...

It's easy to imagine how tough it would be to put in a mechanical implant of some kind - a defibrillator, or an artificial heart, or even a gadget to squirt medication as needed - that required significant wattage. But I'm surely not the first one to note that basic chemistry is what metabolism uses to get the energy for muscles, and to think it's too bad there isn't some way to similarly extract energy from the fuels and oxidizers floating along in the bloodstream to run medical implants.

Heart pumps and anything remotely like that are still out of reach, but earlier this month in PLoS ONE an MIT team reported progress toward getting a trickle of electricity from the...

Just a short time after a tiny telescope got professional-quality data on two transiting planets, the heavy weight champion among transit detectors landed with its own new edition of the on going, space freak show of exoworlds. Researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Ctr for Astrophysics, Univ. of Washington,  and scads of other places report in Science this week discovery with the Kepler space telescope of two planets in orbit so close they're almost in each others britches. They are so close to...

It does sound frightening. H5N1 or the bird flu virus is just five are some other small number of mutations away from being a readily-transmitted human disease that can kill quickly and for which there is no good cure. That's a recipe for pandemic and it ought not be handed out on the street. But another argument has carried the day - even more frightening is the prospect of a global health system with few tools to respond should nature's own meanderingly dangerous evolutionary habits perform the same trick as genetic engineers can now imagine. Many and perhaps most tracker readers are at least generally familiar with long arguments over open publication of research on genetically-modified bird flu. The collective decision was yes...

Oh great. Back in the '80s when the ozone hole was fresh news and the Montreal Protocol was unsigned - but a threat to big chemistry companies such as DuPont so dastardly they sent squads of p.r. guys to newspapers so they could hector science writers by insisting the world could not go on without ozone-clobbering CFCs in our AC units - there was one confusion I strove to correct (quite aside from there being good ozone in the stratosphere and bad ozone down here). Global warming was then as now also in the news. And then along had come another global-scale threat, to ozone. People tended to blame CO2 for ozone holes, and CFCs for global warming, or each for both....