Let's start below the fold on the section front page where...
P W's Tracker
Let's start below the fold on the section front page where, for a change, John Tierney in his column Findings does not write a column. He writes a news feature free of explanation of why he agrees of disagrees with this or that idea, or analyzes some proposition that defies conventional wisdom. But in doing so he may have missed a bet: I am left wondering why in the world, starting with the high stratosphere working down, does a man named Felix Baumgartner want to go supersonic toward the Earth's core (while wearing a spacesuit)? Why does he jump off so many things - with his sights now on a double...
The AP's...
The AP's Alicia Chang reports today that, in a break with history in which the US dominated Mars exploration while occasional (if often excellent) European projects tootles along in the background, NASA and the European Space Agency are working on full coordination of their programs and as more or less equal partners. She gets a good quote from veteran NASA science manager Ed Weiler, who says it should work "if we can lose a little bit of our ego and nationalism."
She provides plenty on the economic and scientific backdrop to such talks. But speaking of ego and nationalism, the story does not address how excited the...
For reasons unclear, The Tracker thought Komodo Dragons are restricted to some essentially uninhabited island wilderness in Indonesia where documentary movie makers feed them the occasional goat to...
For reasons unclear, The Tracker thought Komodo Dragons are restricted to some essentially uninhabited island wilderness in Indonesia where documentary movie makers feed them the occasional goat to show how fierce they are. Wrong again. Two days ago AP's Irwan Firdaus filed a possibly exaggerated tale - maybe by him or his sources or both - hinting a dragon uprising could be underway after...
The Mercury News's Paul Rogers indulged in some old-fashioned, grown-up debunking...
The Mercury News's Paul Rogers indulged in some old-fashioned, grown-up debunking this week. It seems that deep in the attacks and counter-attacks over the economic resuscitation legislation is the allegation of a porky little item assigning $30 million to save a tiny endangered rodent native to San Francisco Bay's salt marshes.
So Rogers looked into it. He traces it to a CNN assertion, and that in turn to a GOP lawmaker's press release. He further tracks the various numbers and other such things associated with it. Looks like CNN, or somebody on its staff who might have looked into the facts, whiffed on all counts. In the meantime, he writes, on the internet it has become instant urban legend. Kudos.
-CP
The Tracker paid little attention, other than to wonder what the doctors were thinking during the pregnancy, to news of eight infants from one mother in one day at a Kaiser facility in Southern California....
The Tracker paid little attention, other than to wonder what the doctors were thinking during the pregnancy, to news of eight infants from one mother in one day at a Kaiser facility in Southern California. Scrolling through feeds as the day wanes today, I find the Los Angeles Times's Shari Roan and Jeff Gottlieb got immediately on the phone to ask experts their opinion of such a pregnancy, risky to mother and to offspring, and of how it came fully to term. One authoritative source told them, "if a medical practitioner had anything to do with it, there's some degree of inappropriate medical therapy there." The story is fairly long, and includes a good deal of information on the risks of such extreme,...
This news hit two days ago - a UC Santa Cruz astronomer and colleagues have gotten the first direct data about weather changes on a planet orbiting another star - a member of a binary system 200 light years away. Naturally...
This news hit two days ago - a UC Santa Cruz astronomer and colleagues have gotten the first direct data about weather changes on a planet orbiting another star - a member of a binary system 200 light years away. Naturally, one presumes that the kind of weather way out there and yet visible, even indirectly, from here has to be pretty wild. It is, and makes the cover of this week's Nature magazine. The Tracker isn't sure if it's nearly that red on the actual Nature cover shown right. It looked so routine in the original that I took a lesson from NASA and enhanced the image (original here), cranking up the mid tones and contrast with Microsoft's picture editor to make it look really really hot-poker ouchy-ouch hot. Any way one cuts it, the pic is not a true photograph but a computer-aided...
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer may be on the auction block and likely to fold soon, but if so it's going out with its head held high - for one thing, it sure kicked the bejabbers out...
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer may be on the auction block and likely to fold soon, but if so it's going out with its head held high - for one thing, it sure kicked the bejabbers out of the boy scouts, huh? That does show mettle, as it seems a sketchy ploy for rebuilding circulation. Not that the kids are targets. It's the adults in charge of Boy Scouts of America and who, via regional councils, manage the considerable land the organization owns for its summer camps. A PI Team led a nationwide investigation by reporters at Hearst newspapers including the San Antonio Express-News, Albany Times-Union, Houston Chronicle, and San Francisco Chronicle. The tone is set by the ...
An editor at Fermilab's and Stanford's SLAC laboratory's joint magazine, Symmetry, points out to the Tracker...
An editor at Fermilab's and Stanford's SLAC laboratory's joint magazine, Symmetry, points out to the Tracker a piece by an intern there that I'd never have seen otherwise and that dives bravely into some rather arcane physics. Ordinarily this, in a hyper-specialty magazine, wouldn't get a post - plenty to do just watching for stuff at the mass media. But anybody, as does writer Lauren Schenkman in this article, who comes up with such a phrase to describe a theoretical exercise as being one that "..undermines the mathematical feng-shui of the otherwise elegant Maxwell's equations..." ? It more than merits a nod. Who'd a thunk up comparing equation-jiggering with rearranging furniture? Sure...
That sure does look like a very large hand axe - or who knows, maybe it was hafted - in the hands of a Malaysian archeologist. The date sounds sensational, and will be so for sure if verified: 1.83 million years (plus or minus...
That sure does look like a very large hand axe - or who knows, maybe it was hafted - in the hands of a Malaysian archeologist. The date sounds sensational, and will be so for sure if verified: 1.83 million years (plus or minus half a million or so). That is as old as, or even older than, any such tool from Africa and southern Europe where such paleolithic tools are usually found. AP's Julia Zappei files it from Kuala Lumpur, reporting that a team from the University of Science Malaysia found it and other stone tools in the northern Perak state. This is a story with many more shoes to drop: it has but a single source who has worked with the specific implements, no reference to its being in a journal, and no evidence it's been through any sort of peer review (blah blah blah). But one hopes the...
Nah, no collusion. But this reminds one of the occasional mutterings of herd journalism that arose when Time and Newsweek happened to run cover stories on the same topics and often with very similar...
Nah, no collusion. But this reminds one of the occasional mutterings of herd journalism that arose when Time and Newsweek happened to run cover stories on the same topics and often with very similar cover illus and key phrasings. Well, folks over at National Geographic and at Smithsonian Magazine are chortling (one hopes) or otherwise muttering. To mark this year's Darwin bicentennial Smithsonian has a great big feature and N.Geo had a huge package (and feature) with identical headlines: "What Darwin Didn't Know" . Folks swear, nobody from either camp - though both are in DC - leaked its premise to the other.
- Smithsonian Magazine - Thomas Hayden : What Darwin Didn't Know ;
- National Geographic - David...
This isn't really new in broad brush terms, but it's news because little public attention has been paid to it: climate change, for all practical purposes, is forever. Carbon dioxide really is oxidized to the...
This isn't really new in broad brush terms, but it's news because little public attention has been paid to it: climate change, for all practical purposes, is forever. Carbon dioxide really is oxidized to the max - it floats, and it hardly reacts with anything very fast. Making limestone the natural way takes, like, eons. So we're stuck with it. That is, unless the geoengineers figure out a way to scrub the CO2 from the air (and even then, the thermal inertia of the oceans would keep our recent heat pulse evident for quite awhile, one assumes). A report, largely by researchers at the Nat'l Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences lays out why the warming already here or in the pipeline will remain substantial for more than 1000 years. It won't ebb away to trivial levels for another 2000 years after that. Imagine if people...
There is not much here strictly science, perhaps a whiff of ethnography and forensic archeology in it, but there is an evocative photo. It's time to button up the site for the day and now this image drifted across the Tracker...
There is not much here strictly science, perhaps a whiff of ethnography and forensic archeology in it, but there is an evocative photo. It's time to button up the site for the day and now this image drifted across the Tracker's monitor - so why not share it? The Advertiser's Michael Tsai reports today an encounter off Waikiki by two storied replicas. One is of a traditional Polynesian voyaging canoe, the Hokule'a, the other a visiting replica of a 14th century Fujian junk. One wonders whether, back in the days of the fabulous Chinese treasure fleets under command of Admiral Zheng He, such original such vessels met up much? In the pic, those two characters in the foreground are not aboard primitive craft - but on modern, paddle...
One way to learn in principle whether cloning - say, Michael Jordan - might produce another prodigious athlete is to watch the progress of a colt named Gemini. The Inquirer's...
One way to learn in principle whether cloning - say, Michael Jordan - might produce another prodigious athlete is to watch the progress of a colt named Gemini. The Inquirer's Faye Flam introduces the youngster to readers as a case study of the faithfulness of cloning as a way to photocopy greatness. Cloning, we learn here, is not permitted in the breeding of thoroughbred race horses. But nothing is in the rules for show horses - such as those that jump barriers - or for rodeo mounts. She writes, "Scientists and horse breeders alike are eager to see how much the clones mirror their originals." A source tells her that, like people, horses have a "really complex set of things in terms of both behavior and...
It's seemed quite plausible that maybe, as reports suggested, the bulk of Antarctica wouldn't be warming even with a CO2 solar forcing on the overall planet - a wilder and windier circumpolar vortex...
It's seemed quite plausible that maybe, as reports suggested, the bulk of Antarctica wouldn't be warming even with a CO2 solar forcing on the overall planet - a wilder and windier circumpolar vortex isolating it further from temperate zephyrs, more storms and cloud cover, maybe somehow the ozone hole is cold, it's almost in the stratosphere on all that ice anyway, or other arm wavings. Data have been a bit ambiguous but pointed toward an overall cooling. Now, scratch that. New sifting of the evidence seems to have undone its singularity in the global warming lineup. (Sort of - see "Note" below).
In Nature today, researchers at the University of Washington and at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan (yep, Jim Hansen's bailiwick) say they've reanalyzed things and find, on average, the whole place is heating up just a tad. True, they say, much...
A team at the Harvard School of Public Health and at Brigham Young U. scored big in the media yesterday and today by saying cleaner air means longer lives. Well, sure, one thinks, it should. But...
A team at the Harvard School of Public Health and at Brigham Young U. scored big in the media yesterday and today by saying cleaner air means longer lives. Well, sure, one thinks, it should. But putting numbers on it is clearly an impressive feat - assuming they're right in their conclusions - of statistical unraveling of causes and effects. The upshot is that Americans' gradually lengthening lifespans owe a lot to better air - with fewer fine particulates to irritate the lungs. It seems to account for nearly five months of longevity's overall three years growth in recent decades. In some places, ten months extra lifespan can be credited to the Clean Air Act and similar regs, it says here. The study had to account for changing income levels, presumably dietary shifts, smoking levels, and other confounders. It's in today's New England Journal of Medicine.
There...
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