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Tracker: November 2011
This site here went on a one-day NYTimes Sci Times strike yesterday. One glance at its lineup leader, a big profile of Steven Pinker, and this tracker thought bah! and enough on him, what's new to say and hasn't he had more than his quota of attention already?! Surely there are better things to do than read this....
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A Dutch team's efforts to get ready for any H5N1 bird flu pandemic - by making a potentially human-virulent strain via genetic engineering to study its behavior in lab animals - has gotten intermittent examination in news reports. Among the first reports, and perhaps the very first, in the latest news crop was an ...
Sometimes the shorter a story, the greater its punch. The mind runs wildly after...
Sometimes the shorter a story, the greater its punch. The mind runs wildly after absorbing the AP's six-sentence story on decision by the US Air Force to leave its little winged orbiter called the X-37B, already orbiting the Earth for nine months, for an unspecified longer time. Then it is to reenter and steer itself with its stubby wings to a runway at, one can only presume, either at Vandenberg Air Force Base, or at Edwards AFB in California's Mojave Desert. "..the ultimate purpose has largely remained a mystery," says this un-bylined squib. Its ride to space was atop an Atlas booster with launch from Cape...
Almost every year in November a train load of...
Almost every year in November a train load of radioactive waste rolls through Germany. Each time it meets considerable public objection. UP to a few thousand protesters turn out at the tracks to stop the convoy. Police, outnumbering them by far, try to keep the route clear. Last year it took the shipment 92 hours to go the roughly 800 miles from the nuclear reprocessing plant in La Hague, France, to the destination - the interim storage facility at Gorleben in northern Germany. This year the train, its high-level waste in eleven dry-cask storage cars, started last Wednesday and did not finish before Monday night. That’s a new record for the protesters, 126 hours, even though their numbers were way smaller than...
One supposes that media elsewhere may have already written a detailed...
One supposes that media elsewhere may have already written a detailed, plain-English and disturbing account of the colossal challenge - one against which they had no immediate chance - nuclear workers at Japan's Fukushima power station number one faced when the tsunami withdrew. And I have listened to one talk, with slides, that covers the essentials. The best I've seen however is in the current issue of the trade and professional magazine IEEE Spectrum. Eliza Strickland walks the reader through it, step by awful step. Well done. The emphatic but cool prose...
Old timers sometimes called them DBI...
Old timers sometimes called them DBI stories - dull, but important. You want dull, try top soil and reservoir levels. Important enough to be readable news, and thank goodness for wire services that dutifully covered this. No other major news outlet arose on first search for others that bothered with it. The news is in announcement this week from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization that intensified farming around the world is extracting a price, in degraded land and strained water systems. Yet, by 2050, that land and those irrigation canals and such will have to be radically more effective as population rises from today's 7 billion to more like 9 billion (absurd what we collectively are doing. When I...
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Hmm. One suspects a UN policy meeting on climate change and its causes hasn't much on offer if on its second day the hot news is where the delegates are going next time. Whether that's a good barometer or not, it is of passing interest that the freshly-announced host-in-waiting is Qatar, smack dab in the middle of OPEC territory, world's...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) In 2005 an ambitious biomedical research center was inaugurated in Valencia (Spain). Now, with the economic crisis in Spain and the short views of our politicians, half of the scientists in The Príncipe Felipe Research Center have been fired, and 14 of 26 labs closed. Some...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) In 2005 an ambitious biomedical research center was inaugurated in Valencia (Spain). Now, with the economic crisis in Spain and the short views of our politicians, half of the scientists in The Príncipe Felipe Research Center have been fired, and 14 of 26 labs closed. Some newspapers have been more critical than others with the extreme cuts. But all reflect the letter of support signed by 3000 scientists around the world.
In a totally different topic, Science published last week a study suggesting that (by adding more data from past events to current climate models) doubling CO2 atmospheric levels might cause less warming than IPCC predicts. One of the study’s coauthors is Spanish. We’ve read some stories about the paper, but none confronts the conclusions of the study with other climatologists that are not involved in the research.
Talking about environment, glaciers in Spain are disappearing fast and they...
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It looked like pretty good news, about as good as one study in the contentious arena of climate change can be. Sorting through what it might and might not mean is difficult, says I who just spent the entire morning trying to figure out what to make of it. Odd that it hit just as the latest round of IPCC climate talks gets going in Duban, So....
Bon voyage Curiosity, daughter of Mars...
Bon voyage Curiosity, daughter of Mars Science Laboratory, the big wheeled bruiser of a rover that NASA hopes to get off the ground Saturday. The aim is to land next August in ancient, gnarly Gale Crater not far south of the planet's equator. It is about 100 miles (154 km) across. Its midsection sports a pile of debris about as high as the Andes. The pic shows just part of the crater's complex terrain, gathered from orbit by NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter and its THEMIS imaging system. Grist has a link to the whole eye boggling gallery. The jumbled edifice, it appears, is a bit of a geologic mystery other than that an impact made it early in Mars's history, sediments buried it, and erosion has slowly re-exposed it...
The Tracker must be the...
The Tracker must be the last to have stumbled on a buzzstorm of speculation over the last three weeks, largely on the blog side of web news but with mainstream outlets jumping in too, over bizarre graphic designs and shapes dotted across China's Gobi Desert. Google Earth, among other non-spy surveillance systems, has been picking them up. Favorite speculation among the loonie rune-readers is that the markings are for calibration of Chinese surveillance, or spy, satellites. If so, that's odd. You'd think plain old, existing stuff would work fine - like the Great Wall, or a solar farm, or airport runways, a freeway cloverleaf, etc. Maybe crop circles, too.
For those in a hurry a one-story...
23Nov 2011
With tomorrow's Thanksgiving Holiday meaning a four-day weekend for most of us here in the USA, we'll be pretty inert here at tracker central until Monday.
To set the mood, here are a few stories out finding a connection between Turkey Day, and research.
- Universe Today - Nancy Atkinson : Mars Rover Finds a Turkey Haven for the Holiday ; Scroll down in the story for an arresting accident scene photo.
- The Atlantic - Nicolette Hahn Niman:...
Several large, syndicated news outlets are...
Several large, syndicated news outlets are carrying modest-sized stories on the annual accounting of collective global refusal to do much about global warming's main, almost only, cause: Rising concentrations of CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, and other greenhouse gases. There are few tricky or slick new ways to write news on deadline when it is no surprise, is bad, and when the official word comes from the same agency as generally does this sort of thing namely the UN and its World Meteorological Organization, and gets endorsed from others among such usual suspects as NOAA.
The AP's...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) Yesterday Charlie tracked about the AP and ScienceInsider stories on a phenomenal fossil whale site in the Atacama that contains one of...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) Yesterday Charlie tracked about the AP and ScienceInsider stories on a phenomenal fossil whale site in the Atacama that contains one of the world’s biggest concentrations of cetacean fossils, plus other animals. The two main lines of the stories were the mystery why all those fossils accumulated in that precise corner of the Atacama Desert, and that the team of paleontologists is in a hurry to remove the fossils and to take 3D images before the site is damaged. Checking Chilean press, we found interesting stories in Mercurio and La Tercera. None of them reflect worries because of the road construction, but to other threats. Last January 2011 La Tercera wrote a long story explaining all the history of the discovery of the site, and alerting that fossils might be damaged now that they are exposed to tough...
Your tracker hasn't much to say about the section...
Your tracker hasn't much to say about the section leading story by Abby Ellin, on the efforts of truck drivers and some health advocates and allies to cut back on their trade's obesity. Many drivers are starting in the logical place - themselves, and putting themselves somewhere other than truck stop diners. Good pictures, good profiles, but no surprises - and that goes for the science of nutrition and of exercise too. This should'a been in another section, one where it might have more impact such as up front in news. Or even biz. One does appreciate the great picture.
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