Much has been made of President Obama's call...
Tracker: January 2011
Much has been made of President Obama's call for accelerated pursuit of clean energy in his State of the Union speech, which he managed without once assembling any syllables sounding remotely like "climate change" or "global warming" or any of that sort of red meat to inspire the elected right wing in Congress to do any more sneering than it already is.
If you can navigate past the pay wall, the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg, stalwart liberal, Jimmy Carter speechwriter, and frequent anchor for ToftheT commentary, does a nifty job sort-of-laying-into the President for his...
(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Chilean seismologists disagree with a paper in Nature Geoscience by Italian researchers, saying that February’s earthquake didn’t relieve all the seismic stress in the region and that the risk of a major quake remains high. In “El Mercurio”, they...
(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Chilean seismologists disagree with a paper in Nature Geoscience by Italian researchers, saying that February’s earthquake didn’t relieve all the seismic stress in the region and that the risk of a major quake remains high. In “El Mercurio”, they argue that their colleagues are wrong comparing 2010's earthquake with one in 1835, and that “although they’ve done a terrific job describing last year’s quake, we don’t agree with the last sentence of the paper saying that the risk of another similar event is still high”. But apart from this interesting discussion, what we want to emphasize in this post is that Paula and Richard from El Mercurio are the only reporters from major Chilean outlets that bothered to talk to local seismologists. Others simply used wires and told their readers that they will probably suffer another devastating earthquake soon.
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As crowds surge through Egypt's streets...
As crowds surge through Egypt's streets in defiance of the authoritarian government of Hosni Mubarack, a few reports have surfaced of looting and attempted looting of the National Museum in Cairo and several other museums and in some cases, historic sites.
The Tracker over recent years has sent a few barbs flying toward Egypt's autocratic and egoistic minister of antiquities, Zahi Hawass, shown in an AP photo in the nearly-looted museum with one of the army soldiers who arrived to help. First reports suggest he worked reacted fast, and may have put himself in some danger too, in preventing things from going much worse for the nation's archeological treasures. Moreover Hawass...
Last September saw a burst of...
Last September saw a burst of arcane physics news (earlier post) on the fine structure constant that physicists use to explain the precise frequencies at which the electron orbitals in atoms and molecules absorb and emit radiation. It's a very basic basic constant, itself constructed from other fundaments such as Planck's constant and the speed of light. It is dimensionless, and is ~1/137. Nobody knows why it is what it is. The news was that a very teeny change in it has been inferred (not proven)...
Last week, Gary Schwitzer's excellent...
Last week, Gary Schwitzer's excellent Health News Review gave a moderately favorable three-out-of-five stars to a story by HealthDay on a case report of a single patient whose blood pressure was lowered by deep brain stimulation.
Schwitzer's panel of experts rated the story satisfactory on several grounds, while criticizing it for not being clear enough on the potential harms and benefits of the technique, in which a probe is inserted deep into the brain to deliver an...
We get today a hint of some of the dynamics behind the National Science...
We get today a hint of some of the dynamics behind the National Science Foundation's press release and news aggregating Science360 News Service, plus a dollop of energetic but incomplete reporting by a media outlet.
This started this morning - after wrestling a router back into routing our internet connection to the PC - with the regular e-mail from NSF carrying the daily lineup at Science360. I always find something diverting there. The eye was drawn first to an NSF press release, from longtimer Cheryl Dybas, on a new computer-driven space...
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My first thought was: If this new discovery of stone tools at the Persian Gulf is right, and we are all Arabs, somehow, this will cause huge trouble on my next entry into the US. "Did you travel via an Arab country?" - well, not personally, but... you know, relatives...
The finding of British and German archaeologists, that humans might have...
Perhaps media...
Perhaps media appetite for the straight reporting of global warming is down a bit, what with the public's recent ebb in interest in the dueling spittle-fest among partisans of various sorts, but it has hardly stopped. Today finds an arresting report in Science on flows of warming water into the Arctic, following a spate of report in the UK chiefly on a new expedition to check how the thermohaline conveyor belt that stops Europe from being so cold is doing.
1) Arctic warm water: The news is that a team from Germany's Leibniz Inst. of Marine Sciences and from U. of Colorado's Arctic and Alpine Research Institute say the flow of North Atlantic waters north through the...
Looks like NASA has...
Looks like NASA has found a relay torch. The refurbished Hubble Space Telescope won't get any more furbishing. It will poop out in a few years. Taking over, budgets and a well-behaved rocket permitting, will be the James Webb Space Telescope. If there's a baton to be metaphorically passed, a good one to choose is UDFj-39546284.
In Nature today, backed by a live internet news conference and press releases listed down there in Grist, a team led by California astronomers (one recently moved to Holland's Leiden Observatory) reports that a teeny, faint, fuzzy, and barely resolved speckette of scruff by that name, lifted from the sky noise in the famed Hubble Deep Field sector of distant...
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Vic McElheny, old pal and former (first too) Knight Science Journalism program boss, passes on a good suggestion - science writers should take a look in the current Nature at the "world view column" by Tim Radford, former science editor for The Guardian. He takes on and rubbishes the idea, often expressed by...
This ran more than a week ago but I just happened upon it. In the...
This ran more than a week ago but I just happened upon it. In the Charlotte Observer is a switch on the usual tobacco and health report. 'Special correspondent,' which presumably means freelancer, Whitney L. J. Howell reports experimental plantings of an easily gene-modified tobacco plant in Research Triangle Park. A Canada-based company, using an Australian tobacco strain with thin and delicate leaves, plans to inculcate the plant leaves with synthetic genes inscribed with the sequences for emerging influenza strains, harvest the vegetation about week later, and separate out particles...
It is by far the most popular...
It is by far the most popular Egyptian artifact in German museums - the 3,400 year old bust of Nefertiti, the wife of Pharaoh Echnaton. The German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt discovered the bust in 1912, and brought it to Berlin in compliance with the Egyptian law at that time. Nevertheless, from time to time (in 2009, e.g.), Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), demands the return of the bust - as once again on Monday. And again, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation rejected the request.
Hawass accuses archaeologist Borchardt of dishonesty to Egyptian officials about the importance of the bust, and believes it was taken illicitly. The bust is not the only...
I just read the best, fairest, hardest-hitting, and deeply...
I just read the best, fairest, hardest-hitting, and deeply reported piece of magazine journalism I've seen on sustainable fish harvesting and whether the labels are correct at your fave chic and green cafe or fish market. Well, that's a narrow field, but this thing is polished and good. It is even written with grace. It has at its core a mesmerizing profile of a near-obsessed fisherman and restaurant owner who worries how long ocean stocks can go before utter collapse. Plus, it's adorned with a bunch of photos of good looking seafood.
It is, I must disclose, by a close local colleague in this business, Erik Vance, a tall outdoorsy guy from here in Berkeley. We don't hang out but he's high on the list of business...
(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Plenty of interesting stories today in the Spanish press. Apart from writing novels, Nabokov also hunted, dissected and classified butterflies. And according to a paper whose first author is a Spanish scientist, he did it very well and his conclusions are totally...
(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Plenty of interesting stories today in the Spanish press. Apart from writing novels, Nabokov also hunted, dissected and classified butterflies. And according to a paper whose first author is a Spanish scientist, he did it very well and his conclusions are totally valid. You can read the story in La Vanguardia (and also in the NYT). El Mundo tells us about a new strategy to treat cancer with capsules that bring carcinogenic cells to the tumor, and once there, they seem to release chemical factors that stop the growth. Público is the Spanish newspaper that fights hardest against pseudoscience. Today it has a set of three stories that give homeopathy a rough time: its basis, the creation of a lobby to defend it, and a regional government that funds an institute of homeopathy with public money. Finally,...
One wonders how the state of US, gov't-...
One wonders how the state of US, gov't-funded research into correlations of murder and mayhem with numbers of guns compares with, say, smoking and tobacco studies at NIH back when The Tobacco Institute was urging surgeons general to shut up about smoking and lung cancer. Or how federal support for greenhouse gas and climate science may soon be faring as Congressional contrarians put their professor-scoffing footprints on the EPA, NSF, DOE, and other tax-money-dependent outfits.
The question comes to mind on reading this morning's NYTimes and its one-two punch of stories connecting the National Rifle Association and its lobbyists to a dearth of federal research into the impact on public...
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