What ho, a lonely planet for sure! Or pretty sure.
One would think that a planet that got loose in the cosmos, free of any star's gravity well, would in no time freeze up solid as a caribou's tundra-pie in January dark and darned near invisible. But a French astronomical team says it has found...
What ho, a lonely planet for sure! Or pretty sure.
One would think that a planet that got loose in the cosmos, free of any star's gravity well, would in no time freeze up solid as a caribou's tundra-pie in January dark and darned near invisible. But a French astronomical team says it has found a fairly young one still glowing faintly in the infrared from the heat released as it congealed from dust and gas. It has a mass of roughly 4 to 7 times that of Jupiter they say. It is about 130 light years away and is near the AB Doradus star cluster. It might even be a member of it. Conceivably it was not even born as a planet agglomerated from leftovers orbiting a star but contracted all by itself as an itty bitty byproduct of a busy star-forming region. The astronomers say they call it a planet because the nomenclature of their trade says anything in this mass range is a planet regardless of provenance. If you look at the paper down in Grist, one infers they are...
The thing about rumors is that they are schizoid material for a story. Reporters may be obligated to report them - if the buzz is semi-public and concerns knowledgeable people making plausible speculation, they are legit topics. But they are not confirmed. If all rumors came true, they would be called facts. But...
The thing about rumors is that they are schizoid material for a story. Reporters may be obligated to report them - if the buzz is semi-public and concerns knowledgeable people making plausible speculation, they are legit topics. But they are not confirmed. If all rumors came true, they would be called facts. But there are so many rumors out there that they outnumber facts. So, they offer to the news writers an avenue to reporting something that is probably not true and yet hold ones head high at the annual press club dinner if one lives any where such a club these days. After all, some rumors are sound.
The news on the space beat for the last week has included rumor that the Obama administration is about to announce as official policy a human expedition farther than anyone has gone before. Just not farther by much - to L2. That's a Lagrangian point, specifically one that sits eternally a modest distance of about 38,000 miles on the other side of the Moon. There,...
One might almost think from some accounts within a spate of small news items the last few days that paleontologists had found a UFO with unearthly bones in it. The news is in a report by a Canadian-born researcher, now at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, who published with colleagues a report in the ...
One might almost think from some accounts within a spate of small news items the last few days that paleontologists had found a UFO with unearthly bones in it. The news is in a report by a Canadian-born researcher, now at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, who published with colleagues a report in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences. They described analysis of the oldest large ceratopsian known from Canada, one whose bones had been stored away in an Ottawa museum, unappreciated, for half a century. It is deeper on the ancestral tree than famous Triceratops, has about the same face and parrot-like beak, a big neck frill, and even more horns.
But reading some of the accounts makes one wonder. How many reporters did any research into this family? I don't mean deep research. I mean any. A few of these stories make it seem that its goofy big head is something unlike any of its family ever seen. The press release (see Grist) may...
In 2008 NASA launched its Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, or GLAST, since renamed the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Gamma rays are given off copiously by very hot things, such as supernovae and accretion disks around black holes, nifty objects one and all if one is a high energy astrophysicist. The...
In 2008 NASA launched its Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, or GLAST, since renamed the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Gamma rays are given off copiously by very hot things, such as supernovae and accretion disks around black holes, nifty objects one and all if one is a high energy astrophysicist. The telescope has gotten good press ever since. No real signs of trouble. Yet, last week at a meeting of Fermi Observatory users in Monterey a NASA man reported to colleagues that fix is underway for a software problem that has, all these years, bollixed the instrument's ability to record gamma rays at the highest energy end of their spectrum.
In other words, one of NASA's so-called Great Observatories isn't quite so great. It cannot now reach its built-in potential. It was doing gangbuster work on what it could see but it is missing some of the very best stuff. But such ability apparently had been in its performance specs from the start. The hottest...
Here's a perversely satisfying episode in the climate wars that makes one a bit ashamed to find it satisfying at all. It appears that in Australia, which one likes to think is among the more progressive, enlightened, and tolerant nations, there exists an office known as the media regulator. Australia also has...
Here's a perversely satisfying episode in the climate wars that makes one a bit ashamed to find it satisfying at all. It appears that in Australia, which one likes to think is among the more progressive, enlightened, and tolerant nations, there exists an office known as the media regulator. Australia also has on its air waves a talk radio man named Alan Jones who has often declared, colorfully, that global warming is a hoax. So the regulator has ordered Mr. Jones, with his decidedly loose way of making lists of truths, to undergo factual accuracy training.
Factual accuracy training for climate change deniers! Woo-hoo, yay, yippeee..hmmmm. Wait a minute, I am so ashamed. One of the prices of a free press is, how could I forget, the persistent encounter with idiots speaking out loud in public including in media. If it's really a mandatory requirement to keeping one's job in media, this codified factual accuracy requirement is sure to...
Hurray for the post that Faye Flam just filed for the tracker on polar ice and polar-opposite politics. It finely dissects the difference between the sort of thing that the AP's Seth Borenstein (and Mike Lemonick at Climate...
Hurray for the post that Faye Flam just filed for the tracker on polar ice and polar-opposite politics. It finely dissects the difference between the sort of thing that the AP's Seth Borenstein (and Mike Lemonick at Climate Central) writes about Arctic and Antarctic sea ice, and what the likes of Mark Morano puts up on the web on behalf of Senator James Inhofe. The senator, do we not all know, is fond of saying global warming is among the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated.
I had also, earlier today, read Seth's story. It pretty well sets straight why adding the sea ice of the Arctic to the sea ice of Antarctica is not a formula that negates global warming as fact. I was going to write a post, which comes up shortly, but did not know about Morano's contribution to this instance of political discourse on science until reading the Flam post. Of course, Morano is...
It's Nobel week and,as hard as describing stem cell manipulations was for yesterday's announcement, the hard stuff hit today with physics and continues tomorrow (probably worse as a brain-stretcher) with chemistry. No other week of the year puts as many science journalists through the wringer, which...
It's Nobel week and,as hard as describing stem cell manipulations was for yesterday's announcement, the hard stuff hit today with physics and continues tomorrow (probably worse as a brain-stretcher) with chemistry. No other week of the year puts as many science journalists through the wringer, which is a metaphor and we're on topics here for which metaphors may be a writer's only hopes. Given the assignment, there is no dodging the requirement to get readers (and oneself) to digest not just the excitement of an early morning phone call from Stockholm, but what more or less exactly it was that somebody did years ago to deserve that precious, life-changing jingle.
The news is that Serge Haroche of the Collège de France and Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and David J. Wineland of the National Insitute of Standards and Technology (atomic clock mecca) in Boulder won for finding ways to observe some quantum systems to learn their status...
I gave the Huffington Post's grab-bag science section editors overnight to fix a gaffe, figuring somebody there would catch on. No go so far.
The Dark Side of the Moon was a well-received album from Pink Floyd many years ago, its title drawing upon its single, "...
I gave the Huffington Post's grab-bag science section editors overnight to fix a gaffe, figuring somebody there would catch on. No go so far.
The Dark Side of the Moon was a well-received album from Pink Floyd many years ago, its title drawing upon its single, "Eclipse." Pink Floyd seems to have known a little celestial mechanics and geometry - during a solar eclipse, the sun gets covered and all we see in its place is the dark side of the moon. But a headline writer at Huff Post decided that the back side of the moon is sensibly called the dark side. Uh... no. It gets just as much sun as the side we see (more, really, when one considers the occasional lunar eclipse). It's an error that occupies a small, occasionally used niche in popular culture. Reporters and editors sometimes - perhaps writing fast and thinking slow - have been known to fall for it. But a news outlet's science-assigned staff really ought to be more...
Well, gee whillikers, circle late November and early December 2013. The brightest most spectacular comet ever, as in ever, heading our way. There are real news stories along that general line, the good ones are full of caution. The summary in this post's first sentence is not inspired by one of the good ones....
Well, gee whillikers, circle late November and early December 2013. The brightest most spectacular comet ever, as in ever, heading our way. There are real news stories along that general line, the good ones are full of caution. The summary in this post's first sentence is not inspired by one of the good ones.
I shall of course start with the one that's over the top. I've posted briefly on the combo of morass of dross and delightfully surprisingly news that is plopped upon one's digital plate at a popular iPad app called Zite. It calls itself a magazine. It appears to assemble content, according to a subscribers selected interests, robotic algorithmic magic. I'd been reading in recent days of comet C/2012 s1, aka ISON (for Int'l Scientific Optical Nework in Russia) now still far away as potentially naked-eye comets go but lookin' pretty good in telescopes. I'll get to what some real reporters have...
I've been laying doggo for a week or two, recovering from a vacation (that included so much loose time I tracked a bit), but a short but snappy story on climate change and the peculiar reticence of either the US President or his would-be successor to mention it prompts a return to duty. I have more too:...
I've been laying doggo for a week or two, recovering from a vacation (that included so much loose time I tracked a bit), but a short but snappy story on climate change and the peculiar reticence of either the US President or his would-be successor to mention it prompts a return to duty. I have more too: competing tales of Earth's polar ice packs plus a recent, disappointing PBS interview.
1) The election season...
The AP this week is circulating a story as part of an election issues project at the service. Except this one is about a campaign non-issue that, some (me, me...but more important, the majority of scientists on this beat) say is an immense, active threat to planet Earth as we know it.
A salute, if not a 21-gun salute, to The Guardian and its enviro reporter John Vidal is in order. He's just back from moseying along the edge of the Arctic ice...
A salute, if not a 21-gun salute, to The Guardian and its enviro reporter John Vidal is in order. He's just back from moseying along the edge of the Arctic ice pack aboard an icebreaker as summer wanes and the re-freeeze season begins. The result is a solid series of reports on the ever-more not solid Arctic sea surface. Those aboard are telling him they they have had to go far north of the 20th century, mid-September norm to find anything but scraps of ice. But find it they do and, as the vessel moves slowly through a dense sea-fog with the temperature a few degrees below zero centigrade, the signs of new ice forming is all-around.
"From now until June, the Arctic sea ice will refreeze," he wrote in one dispatch last week. "First it will be glassy, thin, 'shuga', '...
For a former editor and general assignment guy pretty new to the science beat the Arizona Daily Star's Tom Beal has amassed an output several times larger than the norm. A big chunk of it came this summer in a marathon effort that ran under the running hed, 100 Days of Science...
For a former editor and general assignment guy pretty new to the science beat the Arizona Daily Star's Tom Beal has amassed an output several times larger than the norm. A big chunk of it came this summer in a marathon effort that ran under the running hed, 100 Days of Science. Sure enough, one story a day since early June. The last is due Monday Sept. 10. I ran a post on this already while in Tucson for a meeting. It merits a further round of applause.
Surely a few organizations will think about giving this effort a prize, whether or not it fits the written standards of award eligibility. AAAS? How about NASW? Maybe it'll get him to join! One can't call much or maybe any of it investigative journalism, not in the Gotcha! sense. And the only science-related institutions in Arizona that will be...
With the AP's Alicia Chang in the lead, a few media outlets in the last week or so are relaying news from NASA that its ancient Voyager 1...
With the AP's Alicia Chang in the lead, a few media outlets in the last week or so are relaying news from NASA that its ancient Voyager 1 spacecraft is reaching a milestone, or AU-stone, long after its August 20, 1972 launch. It already swivel-hipped through a series of gravitational slingshots in the late 1970s and 80s that sent it close past Jupiter and Saturn. Its path heaved it onward toward interstellar space. Its sister craft Voyager 2 added Uranus and Neptune to the itinerary but is well behind Voyager 1. The two are the longest-operating spacecraft. That's amazing. Any hook that brings attention to these mechanical Methuselahs seems appropriate.
The news, set off by an August 20 NASA press release (Grist below), is that Voyager I is now wafting its way into the edge of the heliopause.That's...
For the last year or two I've been saying silently to myself deh-ni-SO-vans for the Homo species or sub-species known only from a couple of teeth and a pinky bone and the DNA they contain. Russian researchers found them in the Denisova cave in Siberia, as I'm sure just about all you tracker readers...
For the last year or two I've been saying silently to myself deh-ni-SO-vans for the Homo species or sub-species known only from a couple of teeth and a pinky bone and the DNA they contain. Russian researchers found them in the Denisova cave in Siberia, as I'm sure just about all you tracker readers know. So, because sportscasters say the tennis player Maria Sharapova is named "..share-a-PO-va" I figured the cave's gotta work the same way. Ditto for its mysterious Denisovan residents of long ago. Do you supposed Maria's surname in Russia is Share-AH-peva and it's all sporscaster's fault for my error? Truth is, I did know better once, but forgot and reverted to deh-ni-SO-vans.
To find out this morning I googled "pronounce Denisovans." Thank you Charles Q. Choi. The top hit was to...
We're on vacation this month but each morning I tend to get a tracker itch. Broad band connections - and this central California beach rental has one - make such things hard not to scratch. It came about the time that Mrs. Tracker was trying to find where the meandering Pacific Coast Trail makes it, via...
We're on vacation this month but each morning I tend to get a tracker itch. Broad band connections - and this central California beach rental has one - make such things hard not to scratch. It came about the time that Mrs. Tracker was trying to find where the meandering Pacific Coast Trail makes it, via a new leg, through the posh and exclusive golf courses (Pebble Beach etc.) and grandly over-fancy castles and baronial palaces of Pacific Grove just north of here. Some of those mansions look a little like Xanadu in Citizen Kane. Actually, they're not San Simeon big. But close.
That comes up because I was following a meandering trail of my own on the iPad, leading me to this real keypad. It started with a story, I think the one on BBC, about discovery of millions of supermassive black holes in the centers of dusty, gassy, and shrouded galaxies. It stems from...
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