It had to be there - ah yes, Helium-3 in paragraph 16, nearly half way...
Tracker: February 2012
It had to be there - ah yes, Helium-3 in paragraph 16, nearly half way through a story on setting up mining camps on the moon and that comprises a paragraph break after almost every sentence. He-3 is an isotope that could be valuable many years from now. That's if something like the Int'l Tokomak Experimental Reactor under construction in France actually shows how in principle to get competitive, abundant fusion energy out of magnetic bottles of plasma. The energetics and low neutron flux of fusing deuterium and He-3 are attractive. Some say the surface of the Moon is significantly enriched in He-3 by the solar wind. And assuming that electric rail gun launchers or something else cheap could be developed to shoot it into space for redirection...
The new diagnostic manual being prepared...
The new diagnostic manual being prepared by the American Psychiatric Association, known as the DSM-5, has been the subject of enormous controversy. See this chronicle of the controversy from Psychology Today a couple of years ago, and this from The Huffington Post just a few weeks ago. A Google search will bury you in stories.
So the American Psychiatric Association, which is preparing the manual for publication in May, 2013, should be accustomed to criticism. And isn't that the...
Perhaps all the would-be candidates with a...
Perhaps all the would-be candidates with a remote chance to take over the US Presidency believe that the Heartland Institute is a scientific repository for interpretation of climate trends. But the American people largely remain with the sitting President on the issue of global warming. It's real, it's almost all our fault, so it is time to grow up and do something about it. Well, maybe that last part is excessively wishful thinking. The rest can be inferred from a new poll making news today.
"I'm pleased that Americans believe in thermometers," said Canadian scientist Andrew Weaver, as reported in an AP story...
The 16 scientists and engineers...
The 16 scientists and engineers, some of them trained and experienced in climate sciences, who wrote a Wall Street Journal opinion letter published in late January have recently stuck to their guns in a second such missive. They wrote this to un-repudiate a contrary rebuke the journal later printed from 38 scientists - essentially all of them...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) Mexico's government has announced a patent for a new vaccine against heroin addiction. Researchers at the National Institute of Psychiatry and colleagues at the US's NIH and its NIDA got good results with it in mice. ...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) Mexico's government has announced a patent for a new vaccine against heroin addiction. Researchers at the National Institute of Psychiatry and colleagues at the US's NIH and its NIDA got good results with it in mice. Clinical trials with humans are going to start soon. That's about all we know. Therapeutic vaccines against addiction are at an interesting phase, with plenty of angles and unsolved questions to write about. But shockingly, not a single science reporter in Mexico has elaborated on the story. We’ve just found the basic official information, but no explanation of its mode of action, no details about the studies in rats, and nothing on the researchers who did it. We’ve asked journalists in Mexico about this. They tell us they know of nobody who did anything extensive. El Universal, Milenio, Reforma, La Jornada, Crónica… all have the same kind of...
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All by itself, even without explanation, 'time crystal' is a term that sends the imagination racing. Wow, like a little chunk of something that, uh, crystallizes time! Maybe that's what makes Ironman's chest-implant heart thing glow? But truth is, for the last two weeks or so I've passed on reading deeply into it despite seeing occasional headlines. One reason: a fear that it would...
Recently, William (Bill) ...
Recently, William (Bill) Broad has been raising hackles among lots of yoga devotees. Today's ScienceTimes front pager adds to the list of reasons some, maybe most of them, are unhappy with him. Broad is himself a man who does his yoga. He has written a book about it which, I gather, includes not only the expected history and method, but some of the health dangers. The NYT Magazine in January ran an excerpt, How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body. And today's article turns that around in a fashion that may make...
Update: Note links to two excellent blog posts mentioned in Ed Yong's comment, below....
Update: Note links to two excellent blog posts mentioned in Ed Yong's comment, below. They are from Maryn McKenna and Tara Smith. And note this nice post from Katherine Harmon at Scientific American, thanks to heads-up from Bora Zivkovic:
Staph Turns into Drug-Resistant Superbug on Farms
So I've removed "bloggers" from the hed, above. As Ed points out, the bloggers we would have expected to cover the story did so. Reporters missed the story; the bloggers didn't. And thanks for the help.--PR
Last week, researchers at the Translational...
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We have a lesson in innocently composed but quite dreadful natural history and science reporting right here, and it saved from ksjtracker neglect a news event of considerable interest, if obscure and useful for nothing saving to bolster the general philosophy of environmental conservation.
- The Daily Activist/Just Weird Beat - Maelie Arocho...
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The last two weeks or so have seen a lot of news on NASA's nearly-flat budget which, while not hit as hard as those of many other agencies, as proposed by the White House would call a nearly full stop to the agency's long-running saga of Mars probes. The US has landed a small parade of rovers with the biggest-yet due to touch down later this year, plonked other...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) A team of Spanish and Portuguese scientists has announced discovery of the world’s deepest, cave-dwelling land animal. They found it eating fungi 1980 meters underground in the Georgian Krubera-Voronja cavern. Plutomurus ortobalaganensis and other 3 new species found in the...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) A team of Spanish and Portuguese scientists has announced discovery of the world’s deepest, cave-dwelling land animal. They found it eating fungi 1980 meters underground in the Georgian Krubera-Voronja cavern. Plutomurus ortobalaganensis and other 3 new species found in the cave are primitive wingless and eyeless insects with highly specialized chemoreceptors. Two very good stories in Spain explain details about the expedition. But none explain why it was an unexpected discovery.
In Latin America, we read a very nice story about the motivations of an albino researcher to study albinism. She has just published a paper describing 4 mutations associated to the condition. In Ecuador is a story describing as a fact the hypothesis published in PNAS that changes in “La Niña” ocean-atmosphere phenomenon are affecting migratory birds, with one possible result an increase in flu in the tropics. Elsewhere the communications office of...
It does seem notable and...
It does seem notable and newsy, on first blush. An announcement this week from a Russian, Spanish, and Portuguese speleological expedition near the Black Sea, on an item published in a scholarly journal, reports luring to its trap an eyeless, translucent little arthropod - a springtail of a previously unknown species. It occurred 2191 meters or nearly 7,200 feet below the elevation of a natural cave's entry. That's a record. Deepest land animal anybody has ever found and well over a mile down in Kravura cave which has long been regarded as the world's deepest.
Here are some stories that do nothing to dispel the sense of awe at this creature's singular hardiness, isolation and depth:
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This is unexpected news about the things in the gloaming far...
This is unexpected news about the things in the gloaming far from stars. A statistics-heavy extrapolation from the leading theories of how planets and small stars form, plus the growing count of known planets orbiting other stars, concludes that for every one of the billions of stars in the Milky Way there could be 100,000 planets and dwarf planets (down to the mass of Plut0). That's a lot. Ergo, most of them could be nomads - no mere metaphor but the proffered technical term - long since ejected by the gravitational monkey business of their parent star's planet-making episode. And even that sort of ruckus may not be enough to explain the numbers that the conclusion permits. Many may have formed directly from processes in the...
Gotta go, but just raced through...
Gotta go, but just raced through a badly-needed story on the downside of wind energy. It doesn't come from some climate change denying quarter that just things the whole thing is economic and politically-popular foolishness. This is a bipartisan piece of crusading journalism. Before the weekend commences for me, an urging to read:
Christian Science Monitor - Erik Vance: The 'wind rush': Green energy blows trouble into Mexico; with Part II: Wind power: Clean...
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For whatever reason, languages have people talking.
Stay in this science journalism biz long enough and you'll write about nearly everything. I can't dig up the clips without urgent motive, but am confident that the several stories I've written on the documentation or preservation of rare languages were all from AAAS meetings, and all put me...
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