Tracker: July 2009

The Tracker seems to recall some northern plains state politician saying his constituents could make lots of green money off windpower even without new electric lines to take the it to where there are cities. The solution: make hydrogen with the juice and put the H2 in trains or pipes for delivery. But I haven't heard of that idea since.

Now a variant is on the AP wire from Susan Montoya Bryan.  A startup in New Mexico called Jetstream Wind Inc. says it has raised $219 million to capture wind and perhaps solar energy to generate as much as ten megawatts of electricity, use that to liberate hydrogen and oxygen from water via hydrolysis, and then burn the stored hydrogen and get considerably less...

In no particular order or groupings:

• NPR All Things Considered (Jul 12) - Louisa Jonas (WYPR - Baltimore) : Birds' Survival Relies On World's Largest Crab Orgy ; One wonders it it's really the largest orgy of egg laying by crabs, but the biggest on a beach?, could be. And the crabs are horseshoes crabs - not really crabs anyway.  It's a delightful story with a baneful edge. The birds are little red knots that are really really hungry when they arrive from far away, with a great many miles to go, for a feast to get them through.
• AP - Carla K. Johnson: Study: 7 key genes...

In the Journal of Tropical Ecology this month is an account by an entomologist in the Maldives, out in the middle of the Indian Ocean, proposing a solution to a mystery. Every spring the air gets busy with dragonflies, mostly of a kind called the globe skimmer. They have the right name, although why it is called a globe skimmer could be coincidence. Why they'd go to the Seychelles, a place lacking in fresh water and other rudiments of dragonfly habitat, was a headscratcher. But some evidence gathering revealed they were just stopping in, on their way from India to East Africa traveling along with a seasonal weather and prevailing wind change. Nobody had ever heard of insects migrating so far - 3500 km or about 2000 miles - anywhere. And these do it over open ocean.

BBC's ...

 Here's one that's eye candy, of deep intrigue to those in the news business, and perhaps not terribly meaningful. The Tracker's making a departure from the usual - which is to highlight media stories about science - but going straight to the news mill's grist. So while one is unsure a Cornell University project to display the cycle of political news during the recent presidential campaign merits wide media circulation to the general public, to those on the inside, it's fascinating and repellent at the same time. You mean the TOP political phrase and by implication the top story during the momentous recent campaign, from August through October, reduces to lipstick on a pig? Oh great Republic, we weep for thee. Hmmm. Of course campaigns may ever have been equally banal - as in Tippecanoe and Tyler too?

The project gets explanation at The Cornell...

Apollo 11 and its three astronauts left for the moon on July 16 some 40 years ago. Four days later Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on it and then climbed down a ladder to stand on it. The Tracker wonders. At the NYTimes, when the science editors and writers and their overseers sat down to plan today's elegant Apollo-only section, what piece and its theme was most disputed?

My first instinct this morning was to imagine voting against John Schwartz's article well inside on the tiny cult of nonbelievers who, in a case of literal lunacy, insist the moon landings were a Cold War fraud.  Schwartz does it well, offering not a scintilla of plausibility to such imaginings - even less than he might offer to hunters of Big Foot. But now I'm thinking it was the right call,...

And that word in the hed is not quick-charge, but quick-change. Or, as CNET's Martin LaMonica writes, to get more electrics into people's garages, they should have the option of leasing the battery while buying the car - and to leave the recharging to somebody else.

A new report from a UC Berkeley embraces a concept that a few entrpreneurs already are pursuing: filling stations with gizmos that slide exhausted batteries out and fresh ones in. It could perhaps be done even more quickly than it takes to fill an empty tank with gasoline. That, plus recharging at home when one doesn't need to go 100 or more miles at a time, could make electricity just as convenient as liquid fuels. Depending on such factors as the cost of...

    Media observers as well as its insiders have been warning repeatedly but largely in the abstract of the civic harm that will follow as traditional newspapers shrivel and in some cases disappear. A much-needed concrete example is laid out superbly at the Columbia Journalism Review’s The Observatory on news from the environmental beat.

Russ Juskalian writes an eye-opening ode to the few reporters covering the trial of W. R. Grace Co. for what federal prosecutors called a criminal failure to warn the public of dangers from a mine whose ore is contaminated by asbestors fibers. The Seattle PI’s reporter on the beat has had, since the paper folded its paper operation and went digital, to find other on line outlets. In Montana, the Missoulian newspaper...