A few years ago The...
Tracker: December 2009
A few years ago The Tracker developed a slight crush on Stirling engines as the key to affordable solar energy. This was because of the sales job a company in Arizona laid on the media. Then...pffffft. Hardly heard anything about it. But thanks to Scientific American's Cynthia Graber, some of the reason becomes apparent. They didn't work, as reliably or cheaply, as advertized. But the company is still perking along. Maybe it can still work out the kinks.
Grist for the Mill: Stirling Energy Systems...
The Wall Street Journal published a tangled bit...
The Wall Street Journal published a tangled bit of intrigue over the Christmas break (it seems to have been published Dec. 23, but it's now dated Dec. 29 in the version I found on the web) concerning two Northwestern University cardiologists who were once collaborators and are now at war. The fight concerns a decision to implant a new heart valve ring, and whether FDA approval was required.
The Journal story, by Alicia Mundy and Jared A. Favole, uses the Northwestern battle to highlight shortcomings in the FDA's approval of new devices.
It's a good piece, but it's not as good as the series of articles that Shelley Wood has been writing for more than a...
In the UK's Register this...
In the UK's Register this morning Lewis Page pivoted on a press release from Thomas Jefferson University. He whipped out this snappy, only-in-Britan lede: Boffins in Philadelphia have come up with a radical new plan for biofuels. Rather than the cars of tomorrow running on various forms of alcohol, sunflower oil, algae etc., the scientists propose that they should instead be fuelled by burning tobacco. Were tomorrow not the New Years holiday, I'd wait a day to post on this to see who else runs it and how they handle it. The research effort is worth reporting and at more length than this...
One post down The Tracker takes on a different story from the...
One post down The Tracker takes on a different story from the UK, and notes that its writer also bit on news from Oregon State University on robotics research. There, professors are inspired by the skillful, unthinking manner by which cockroaches skitter about. Who else wrote about the possibility of roachlike robots?, I wondered.
The local paper in Corvallis, for starters. At the Gazette Times, under David Stauth's on line byline, there it is. Yikes, the credit line id's Stauth as at OSU's News and Communications office. This goes well beyond lifting a story from the release...
A remarkable report on antibiotic resistant bacteria, especially the...
A remarkable report on antibiotic resistant bacteria, especially the staph called MRSA, is been running on the Associated Press wire. I just noticed it today. It deserves follow up and, one hopes, leads to a new and surprising way to counter the surge in drug-resistant infections. And as seen at the end of this post, this dispatch is part of a larger AP project.
Reporters Martha Mendoza and Margie Mason (the latter a current Nieman Fellow at Harvard) report on and update a remarkable, government-mandated behavior change imposed on doctors in Norway...
(First iteration: Dec. 23) It's that time of the...
(First iteration: Dec. 23) It's that time of the year, and we'll update this a few times by January 1 - and once or twice move it back to the top of the post queue. Maybe even attempt a meta-analysis (UPDATE: nope, forget the master list mega meta). One story that does make nearly all top science lists: Ardi, the bipedal tree climbing and not terribly apish human ancestor aka Ardipithecus.
Additional suggestions welcome. Here, in no particular order:
- AAAS Science Magazine: Breakthrough of the Year and nine runners up ; Password-blocked. But Ardi takes the cake.
- ABC-Lauren Cox...
31Dec 2009
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When the movie 2012 opened...
When the movie 2012 opened - and well before - a fair number of science writers and even scientists rushed to explain to readers that no, don't worry, the Mayan calendar or the likes of Nostradamus and left-over New Age apocalypso-weirdos did not and don't have the inside scoop on planetary alignments, neutrino beams of strange cross section, or doppelganger planets that are about to cut the Earth's crust tectonically asunder and drown the Himalayas and most everywhere else in a mega-Noachian flood.
Ah, but Avatar, this month's eye-popping 3-D spectacular exploration of mankind's exploitation of nature - wrapped up in a thin guise of space-opera at Alpha Centauri A - that's different. In...
AP's...
AP's Vladimir Ischenkov has on the wire from Moscow today a sketchy report that Russia's top space program official urges that his nation and international partners consider a mission to nudge an asteroid even farther off course from hitting the Earth. The space boss, it says here, said on a radio program that it aims to nudge the Earth-orbit-crossing asteroid Apophis from its current trajectory, one that (as has been widely reported) has a slim and fading chance of crossing said orbit at the same moment and place where Earth is...
No paraphrase could do justice to John Fauber's...
No paraphrase could do justice to John Fauber's latest investigative piece on medical conflicts of interest in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Here are the first three grafs:
"In 2002, Thomas Zdeblick, a University of Wisconsin orthopedic surgeon who has pocketed millions of dollars in royalties from the spinal device maker Medtronic, took over as editor-in-chief of a medical journal about spinal disorders.
"It would be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
"In the years to come,...
At Science News...
At Science News Ron Cowen has a short piece notable for its being the only story, far as one can tell - and it's been there for about a week - on the earliest observation yet of a star's conception. This could be a genuine seminal event - no baby yet, but things are cooking.
The news in somewhat more detail is that a team based in France has published on line, at the astronomical pre-journal parade ground that is the arXiv site of works in progress (see Grist below), an analysis of unusual radio telescope data from Taurus. They...
Gina Kolata weighs in today in The New York Times with what seems to be the 10th piece in...
Gina Kolata weighs in today in The New York Times with what seems to be the 10th piece in her series on the war on cancer, which began in April. As I've noted here before, she has been relentlessly pessimistic about the outcome, despite a recent AP story--published in the Times--that reported that the cancer death rate has been declining for 20 years.
Now, in...
The Los Angeles Times has a...
The Los Angeles Times has a heartbreaking piece this morning on a 7-year-old girl (January Schofield, photo) with child-onset schizophrenia. The child's latest accomplishment is managing to stay out of the hospital for 56 days--her longest stretch at home in 15 months.
Shari Roan does a nice job with this piece, a follow-up to a much longer feature she wrote last June.
It's not entirely fair to criticize Roan for writing the story she wanted to write, rather than the one I would have preferred. But I'm going to cross that line...
The Climate Conference in Copenhagen is history, and after expressing huge frustration most German newspapers have quit reporting...
The Climate Conference in Copenhagen is history, and after expressing huge frustration most German newspapers have quit reporting about the "results". Time for a summary therefore on how the German media handled it.
First of all: Every newspaper, every news magazine, every online outlet covered the conference with special sections, special reports, and special attention generally (and not only in the science sections). The national media's hope, that humankind might be able to come up with a global contract for a greater good, was the message that one could read between all these lines. Commentators couldn't hide their disappointment that politicians couldn't achieve more than to take notice of the "Two-Degrees"-goal (the temperature shouldn't rise more than two degrees Celsius by 2050)....
What a yeasty diverse...
What a yeasty diverse lineup in the New York Times's sciwriting corps has delivered this week.
The Tracker starts by by momentarily skipping the manure on the front page (that's literal, not a value judgment) to the one that got my motor running. Carl Zimmer, on the print section's p. 3, provides a breathtaking glimpse of what genetic diversity really can mean. Years ago, before Norman Pace left Berkeley for the U. of Colorado, he told me he could not get very excited by those who say we need to save all the frogs or funguses or sponges we can because for one thing their...
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