There must be some more press on a...
Tracker: May 2010
There must be some more press on a remarkable expedition now underway through a jungle of Indonesia and up a massif called Punca Jaya where lingering glacier fragments await. After reading of it on line in the current Science magazine, where Richard Stone explains the urgency and the incentive to get a core (Story may require a EurekAlert! or subscriber password to read), I went looking to see where else it runs.
Bingo, but only one so far. If others have written this up, let...
While most of the press has jumped around chasing news...
While most of the press has jumped around chasing news conferences and walking the oiled beaches and marshes, talking with distressed residents, taking notes at Congressional hearings, and so forth - all good and necessary tasks - a few outlets have looked away from the now and looked at the ago. Notable example: that hot spot of liberal-progressive newscasting and mostly-politics programming, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show with its segment "Oil spills then...
In 2002, St. Anthony's Medical Center in St. Louis told a psychiatrist he could...
In 2002, St. Anthony's Medical Center in St. Louis told a psychiatrist he could lose his hospital privileges, following charges that he had delivered substandard care. The doctor sued hospital officials, and the hospital settled--agreeing to accept the doctor's resignation and not report him to a national databank of problem doctors.
His record, in other words, remained clean, despite the charges.
Jeremy Kohler and Blythe Bernhard of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch did a nice feature using this case to highlight the shortcomings in medicine's...
(English intro to Spanish lang. post) SciDev brings us a shocking story about the scientific and legal dispute between two biologists, and how it has played in the press, in Peru. In 2007 "El Comercio" reported that a researcher had found illegal transgenic maize in a...
(English intro to Spanish lang. post) SciDev brings us a shocking story about the scientific and legal dispute between two biologists, and how it has played in the press, in Peru. In 2007 "El Comercio" reported that a researcher had found illegal transgenic maize in a Peruvian Valley. Two months later, another scientist severely criticized the methods and conclusions used, and took the newspaper to task for writing about a study that has not been published in a peer reviewed journal. We strongly reject this second critique, and defend our obligation to cover more than what appears in scientific magazines. We applaud the criticism he did on the study, though. But listen to this: he was accused of defamation and sentenced to pay a fine in Lima. The SciDev story in English here.
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Holy moly, that's an amazing...
Holy moly, that's an amazing looking dinosaur, even allowing for the fanciful pigmentation added by UK artist Luis Rey (hi def here). Obviously a ceratopsian, of the clan that includes iconic old Triceratops. This one is a newly identified species from Montana - and it's not even the only member of the clade in the news.
A second one is from Mexico, not quite as fancifully painted but sporting the heftiest horns yet found on these extinct beasts. For awhile this morning I thought it was all the same news - until it started to look as though a few reporters got it mixed up...
I like Bill Nye just fine, he's entertaining and provides himself a good living...
I like Bill Nye just fine, he's entertaining and provides himself a good living and the public a good service by making science easily comprehensible. He's a serious man at heart, I'd wager. But really, really?, is he the best that a major media outlet can do when it comes to explaining something as simple as buoyancy and density and how a "top kill" uses heavy mud to change the density of the column in that pipe from the oil zone deep in the Gulf to the busted top so that it's so heavy it doesn't bubble out any more?
Here, courtesy of New York Magazine, is CNN's John King's broadcast where he calls...
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Remember NASP? No, not the National Assoc. of School Psychologists, the National Archery in the Schools Program, National Association of Safety Professionals, National Assoc. of Sales Professionals, Nat'l Assoc. for Shoplifting Prevention, or nuclear autoantigenic sperm protein. Of course many of you don't. This goes back to the Reagan administration's X-30 program of the mid-80s, aka National Aero-Space Plane (which makes it a forced...
In world where security agencies fall for expensive dowsing wands to detect...
In world where security agencies fall for expensive dowsing wands to detect hidden explosives (eg, see this Register report from Lewis Page in January), it is no surprise that other screwy or at least un-documented means of keeping us even safer from terrorists than we are already are wangling their way on to governmental budgets.
At Nature News today is a piece by DC freelancer Sharon Weinberger that ought to pretty well demolish expectation by people who are rational that something...
The Tracker has to admit being...
The Tracker has to admit being slow this morning, distracted by the live feed from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico with goop spraying all over the place from the infamous Blow Out (Non)Preventer. BP and its contractors, with the feds looking over their shoulders, are blasting heavy drilling mud into every valve to which they can hook a hose. Clearly, a good deal of the heavy fluid is not going down the drill casing but is leaking every which way from the BOP. But some is going down the pipe too, its density slowing and, one hopes, overwhelming the crude's bouyancy-driven rise.
There is not, to be sure, much directly about science or environmental analysis in this specific effort. The...
The decision this week by NASA to...
The decision this week by NASA to abandon all hope of hearing another peep, tweet, or other telemetry burst from the Mars Phoenix lander stirred a lot of entertaining, sort of respectful, headlines from journalists. The mission's forecast inability to survive a Martian winter was not the only reason it was news - so were the orbital photos showing a change in the shape of its shadow, barely discernible at the camera's resolution. The inference is that a thick layer of dry ice hoarfrost, or maybe a solid slab, collapsed one of its flimsy solar panels. It probably didn't feel a thing, dead already.
There is news here, and also a chance for writers to show some whimsy and to harmlessly go into full...
Forget fight or flight. In a special issue on the brain, Discover...
Forget fight or flight. In a special issue on the brain, Discover magazine explains that's it's all about the four F's: fight, freeze, flight, or fright.
And writer Jeff Wise elaborates on that with a story of an encounter between Sue Yellowtail, a 25-year-old water-quality specialist for the Ute Indian tribe, and a mountain lion.
Wise tracks Yellowtail with the deadly acuity of a mountain lion as she passes through the four stages. It's an illuminating and dramatic story.
But it could have been much more. (In fairness, this is an excerpt from Wise's 2009 book, ...
(English intro to Spanish lang. post) The principal newspaper in Peru, El Comercio, has in its Sunday supplement an excellent 12 pages special report about Peruvian biodiversity. It’s a great job with nice images, very informative infographics, and...
(English intro to Spanish lang. post) The principal newspaper in Peru, El Comercio, has in its Sunday supplement an excellent 12 pages special report about Peruvian biodiversity. It’s a great job with nice images, very informative infographics, and extensive data specific to Peru. It should be read by all the students in the country. We learned about the 4,000 varieties of potatoes, the endangered butterflies, the efforts to preserve the Amanacay flower, the value of indigenous knowledge, how this natural richness empowers a very diverse cuisine, how poaching threatens the survival of the only bear living in the southern hemisphere, and the risks that transgenic crops pose if they ever reach Peruvian soil. We have a few details on which to comment, but overall it’s a big effort that deserves even bigger recognition.
When I see ...
When I see Richard Black's byline on a BBC environment story I can usually count on a solid and professionally done report. Usually they are straight journalism. He has one in a more bloggery style right now under the rubric Earth Watch. The hed: Europe debates climate 'ambition' . It is good, and aimed at people with a serious interest in climate change and the response to it. Hence, no histrionics about emails or the rising tide of public skepticism.
It ties together a few things one may have read about but not all in one place - Europe's recent fall-off in...
It's not easy amid the hectic anxiety of...
It's not easy amid the hectic anxiety of the news cycle for a reporter to step back a moment to find out and tell readers whatever happened after that headline we foisted on you some while ago. At USA Today Dan Vergano poked at the political and policy-riddled ant colonies at NASA to find out what's up with a human expedition to an asteroid. The column, on line only, went up two days ago....
25May 2010
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One doesn't just write a phrase like "the enduring laxity of federal regulation" without a certain furious grimace. That comes up with a rather late, but nonetheless two-fisted article - not papered over as a "news analysis" - top of the fold page A1 of the NY Times today by Campbell Robertson, Clifford Krauss, and John M. Broder...
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