Tracker: September 2011

Long-shot chances of catastrophe are a slippery topic in news. Catastrophe gets people's attention. Longshots do not, so much, unless it's a lottery and you can convince people to pay you zillions of dollars to let them take a shot at misery (We hardly ever read abut people, years after a big jackpot, who are happily livin' like Riley).One can run stories every day in earthquake...

Gotta go for the weekend, but want to at least recognize the news from SpaceX, or Space Exploration Technologies Corp, and its CEO Elon Musk that it plans in the medium-future to build reusable rocket ships, many even reusable space ships for people. That's the road shuttle started down. It saved no money. But Musk said yesterday at the National Press Club that the idea may yet be sound.

I'll list the stories, but do have two observations. First, SpaceX has been tightroping for awhile now, and hasn't fallen off yet. So this ambition is plausible. Second, the proposal would build rockets and capsules that, upon return to Earth for reuse, would land on their tails using remaining...

One post down the KSJTracker's Pere Estupinya, who covers Spanish language press, reports encouraging results from Spain itself in a Phase I trial of a new proposed HIV vaccine called MVA-B. As he writes, efficacy can't be established until higher-dose Phase II tests on more people (this one has 24 subjects) are complete. But even the Phase I trial for safety stimulated significant immunity to the virus and has persisted for a year in most of the trial's test subjects.

He also notes that much of the English-language press reporting, what there is of it so far, highlights somebody's proclamation that the trial may mean HIV could be rendered into a minor infection. He says Spanish...

One may have seen videos of birds dropping shelled prey onto rocks to break them open, technically a form of tool use. Now comes word of a similar maneuver by fish. A type of wrasse, the orange-dotted tuskfish that lives in the tropical Pacific, has learned to break open clams by smacking them against rocks. So reports researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Thus tool using, while not quite up to mastery of the iPad or even of a pair of pliers, is known in a diversity of animals - chimps pulling insects from nests with slender sticks, dolphins using sponges to wipe away sediments, octopuses that make shelters from cocoanuts, and so on.

Stories:...

Your tracker has to confess to deliberately ignoring the day by day  coverage as NASA's defunct Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite tumbled lower and lower in orbit, out of control and just barely vaguely posing a chance of hurting somebody as its stouter bits crash to Earth. You'd have to be nuts to lose sleep over it - or dreadfully ignorant of this one corner of reality. One must be fair. Most people have more important things to do than to bone up on such things as odds of space debris hitting anybody. Public anxiety is understandable and no character flaw. But it was still baseless.

Anyway, it's usable news now because of a lucky shot. Not only did the bird make its final flutter without damage to any human or human-...

And while searching for one thing - any story in the Anchorage Daily News reporting unusual northern lights due the solar storm Monday with chances of more from a giant sunspot complex (none) - The Tracker came across a diverting tale of surprise on Alaska's Kodiak Island.

The Anchorage paper picked up from the smaller Kodiak Daily Mirror a story by reporter Wes Hanna. It says here that  the curator at the local Alutiq Museum and his colleagues got a surprise this summer. Hoping to find remains of  a permanent settlement by the early Alutiq...

Wow. If ScienceTimes's editors told me they had a special issue coming up on medical care in nation's saddle by poverty and lack of infrastructure, I'd think how worthy and how very dull.

Worthy yes, dull no. The section is led and promoted by ace health writer Donald G. McNeil Jr. whose primary contribution on a dirt cheap test for precancerous lesions in cervical cancer is on the front page of the front section (with a large insert-plug for the whole section). It is a refreshing reminder how clever people can be when under the gun to find a better, cheaper way of business. We find astonishingly easy ways to nearly wipe...