Nothing good happens, is what happens. Almost any general purpose science writer who tries to make a living in daily news has, sooner or later, written of the...
Tracker: July 2009
Nothing good happens, is what happens. Almost any general purpose science writer who tries to make a living in daily news has, sooner or later, written of the gadgetry and forensic skills that art historians have amassed over the years to guide the preservation of old and deteriorating paintings and the like. X-rays, mass spectrometers, IR, UV, etc etc. Maybe PET scans too. Everybody in the Western World has seen the Shroud of Turin rendered in weird spectral imagery to show what it is and how maybe it occurred. Ditto for pictures of the pictures Old Masters put on canvas before they finished their ultimate pictures. At the Wall Street Journal old master Robert Lee Hotz takes a good crack at it...
Nothing like a big report in Science Magazine, backed by four press releases from some very careful, muscular, and august agencies, to cheer up one who had begun to fear it is adios to the likes of salmon, tuna, cod, and toothfish...
Nothing like a big report in Science Magazine, backed by four press releases from some very careful, muscular, and august agencies, to cheer up one who had begun to fear it is adios to the likes of salmon, tuna, cod, and toothfish; 'nought but krill, dead reefs, and jellyfishes for the world's oceans by mid-century. In November 2006 a big (and controversial) paper in Science identified a seemingly intractable continuing collapse of major fisheries worldwide. See previous posts here, and here. This new analysis - with its authors including some of the previously gloomy ones - says a good many fisheries are instead showing solid signs of improvement. International and national fisheries agencies, it appears, are getting dividends from the recent rounds of steep cuts in...
Give the native oysters of Chesapeake Bay a tall place to stand, and they come roaring back (at least until viruses or other ailments hit them). So it...
Give the native oysters of Chesapeake Bay a tall place to stand, and they come roaring back (at least until viruses or other ailments hit them). So it seems at the five year mark of a project on one of the bay's feeder rivers and overseen by researchers at William & Mary College's Va. Inst. of Marine Science. The results are in Science, and are in keeping with its big package on fisheries management (see next post). The Washington Post's David A. Farenthold calls the result a "vast, thriving reef of American oysters." One supposed 87 acres is at least half vast. He gets lively quotes from researchers themselves amazed at how well it worked. He...
Chris Mooney and his regular collaborator Sheril Kirshenbaum have distilled just about every morsel of insight that's been floating around lately into how the collapse - in the US primarily - of journalism and science journalism in particular is affecting how the public gets its occasional bit of science news. It is freshly on line in The Nation after a run in its print issue.
The spot-on title: Unpopular Science. The Tracker has been a bit surprised and gratified recently to have so many people who have no particular connection to our business ask about its situation and its prospects. Perhaps others in the trade have, too. This article is the best answer. It's not particularly...
Earlier this week the LA Times's Thomas H. Maugh II wrote up in generally fine...
Earlier this week the LA Times's Thomas H. Maugh II wrote up in generally fine style a tempest among archaeologists. It concerns environmental factors that may have spurred the Inca to climb high in the Andes and establish the region's dominant civilization. Some say it was regional warming, others are not buying it. Fine, except one thing: why imply it is a lesson in global warming politics? His lede is an expansive Global warming is not necessarily always bad. Even in the context of his story, it appears to have been bad for the area's non-Inca. But the important point is that his lede led to this hed: Global warming played a role in Incas' rise, report says.
Nothing in the story he wrote says the warming, if it...
That's right, numbyism, or "not under my back yard" ism. At The Guardian Terry...
That's right, numbyism, or "not under my back yard" ism. At The Guardian Terry Slavin and Alok Jha report that the highly-publicized Schwarze Pumpe project in northern Germany - a small, advanced coal burning plant with big pumps and pipes for sequestering a big share of its CO2 underground - has been unable to get a permit from spooked local authorities. The story does not say exactly why neighbors are not buying assurances from the company and the government. Perhaps they have heard that CO2 is not always safe in large amounts - were the heavy gas to leak in a big burst from the depleted gas field that is to contain it, the result could, as has happened following the overturning and burping of lakes atop volcanic CO2 vents, suffocate...
(English intro to Spanish lang. post) A science journalist at Guatemala's Prensa Libre checks regularly for science and technology research in the Universities and institutes from her country and brings it to her readers. Such a beat may be routine in US media but is not so common in some Latin...
(English intro to Spanish lang. post) A science journalist at Guatemala's Prensa Libre checks regularly for science and technology research in the Universities and institutes from her country and brings it to her readers. Such a beat may be routine in US media but is not so common in some Latin American countries. There, scientific information, if any, comes mainly from wires without much local processing. The tracker congratulates Lucy Calderon and encourages other outlets to pay attention to her work. Ah! And explain her latest story, about the biodiesel production developed in the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala.
Because the tracker is never fully happy, one compares the pdf with the online version and proposes a way to improve a little bit the web template.
El periódico Guatemalteco Prensa Libre tiene una sección...
As an attention grabber, "Genome wide association study" is like a dead turbot: flat, inert, and (to American ears anyway), obscure in meaning. Maybe it should be relabeled genetic dragnet or something else...
As an attention grabber, "Genome wide association study" is like a dead turbot: flat, inert, and (to American ears anyway), obscure in meaning. Maybe it should be relabeled genetic dragnet or something else a bit zippier. The Inquirer's Faye Flam today manages two salutory things - she buries the term deep enough not to scare people off, and provides a rare look at a scientific program in full medical research mode but without hyping any impending cures or other breakthroughs.
The news is a profile of a hard-working doc at the local medical research powerhouse, Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia or CHOP to locals, and the center's new storehouse of children's DNA. One immediate focus is on...
Marine biology and physical oceanography are getting a bit more blur injected into the boundary layer between disciplines. New research published in Nature - featured on the cover - and led by researchers at Caltech concludes...
Marine biology and physical oceanography are getting a bit more blur injected into the boundary layer between disciplines. New research published in Nature - featured on the cover - and led by researchers at Caltech concludes that it's not just wind and winding currents that mix the ocean's waters vertically. The daily cyclings of uncountable marine creatures migrating up and down from teeny copepods to big jellyfish, say the scientists entrain a lot of water. So much they say that their impact - if confirmed by further research - cannot be ignored in computer models of the ocean's churnings.
Several stories focus on jellyfish as the prime bio-motivators of this conveyor belt. And Nature itself titles its press blurb "Moving the oceans, one jellyfish at a time." That's a little misleading. The researchers studied jellyfish closely because they are large and their ability to entrain...
The Toronto Star announced this week the opening of its Arctic Bureau, comprising for the moment, it appears, one man: Pulitzer-winning foreign correspondent Paul Watson...
The Toronto Star announced this week the opening of its Arctic Bureau, comprising for the moment, it appears, one man: Pulitzer-winning foreign correspondent Paul Watson. The new Arctic bureau chief is best known as a photojournalist - and won the prize in 1994 for a gut-wrenching photograph from Somalia of the bloody results of the American incursion there into war lord factional fighting. He also has won awards for reporting for the Star, and recently was South Asia bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times.
Watson's first dispatch is from aboard a Canadian icebreaker. It's a well-composed piece on exotic research in a tough environment. Watson swiftly takes readers through the lens of a microscope and into the realm of plankton...
AP's ...
AP's Marilynn Marchione writes the somewhat itch-promoting news today that, in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers in the Netherlands report that they were able to innoculate a small number of volunteers against malaria with the help of a vaccine delivered by ... mosquitoes. And the vaccine is the malaria parasite itself. The story includes the caveats near the top that this is not merely a small study, but even if its results are confirmed no practical way to use mosquitoes as substitutes for syringes is in the offing. But it does indicate, she reports, that whole parasites's seeming effectiveness as inocculates may help lead to other ways...
The current Atlantic has been brought to the Tracker's attention for its big swaggering story...
The current Atlantic has been brought to the Tracker's attention for its big swaggering story by Graeme Wood full of dynamic adjectives and gripping imagery on what it might take to dial the Earth's temperature downward, pronto, with the appropriate application of imagination, sun shades, reflectors, aerosols pumped through dirigibles, or other mega-machinery. People who follow such things won't see many general concepts that have not been written up before. But Wood does have a fresh angle: compared to, say, rejiggering the world's entire coal-and-oil based economy, it might be very cheap. One over-reaching billionaire might, plausibly, foot the whole bill. The story goes on to suggest, however, why cheapness does not a wise policy make....
At Aviation Week's site yesterday Frank Morring, Jr...
At Aviation Week's site yesterday Frank Morring, Jr., was among a parade of reporters relaying early indications of the new NASA future that the Augustine Commission might urge. His story's hed is U.S. Spaceflight Gap Wider Than Thought. It nails the primary structural problem that the last administraiton imposed upon the space agency - the years' long interval between the last shuttle flight and the first operation of its successor rockets from the Constellation Program. All this to save money while not flying shuttles so that the new launchers can be built - and while closing the finally finished, essentially brand new space station after tens of billions of US dollar invested and inveigling overseas...
Check out the cheeky column in the Los Angeles Times by one Jonah...
Check out the cheeky column in the Los Angeles Times by one Jonah Goldberg, a man with a worry on about asteroids and, it appears, a very low opinion of what he regards as egghead liberal scientists and their eco-freak toadies who dream of throttling unregulated economic growth (he means free enterprise, one is confident) and thus overdo it on climate change as a vehicle for anti-capitalist regulation. Or something like that.
The recent smack on Jupiter's bottom is his immediate inspiration. The result is a fairly well-founded fantasy on the rear view mirror wisdom that would ensue should a modest asteroid strike Earth in 100 years. That, he proposes as a mental exercise, is to occur just as we're celebrating a near-...
It was dry in California and much of the Southwest this year, last year, and the year before that. Fires have been getting worse with, says a forecast from researchers up in comparatively rainy Corvallis in...
It was dry in California and much of the Southwest this year, last year, and the year before that. Fires have been getting worse with, says a forecast from researchers up in comparatively rainy Corvallis in the Willamette Valley at Oregon State University and the US Forest Service, still worse to come. It's a national study and it fingers most of California, some regions in Oregon and Washington, and bits of North Carolina and northern Wisconsin as most likely to have a fiery late summer and fall. Much of Texas and the Southwest generally also look like tinder. One factor, the reports says, is a budding El Nino in the tropical Pacific and a shift to a positive mode in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation to its north. Both tend to heat and dry the southwestern US.
Stories:
- San Jose Mercury News/Media News Group - Mike...
©2010 Knight Science Journalism at MIT. All Rights Reserved.