Category: Science Stories

The Journal-Sentinel's John Fauber has the right lede on his story of the pros, cons, and maybes of the most iconic deliverers of caffeine: "Coffee, tea or a cup of confusion?" This is the rare and informative, and therefore not really useful, health story whose main upshot seems to be giving readers no good idea what to do. The story is loaded with bits and pieces of various studies saying coffee seems to raise risk of heart attack in some people, but to lower it in others; it could raise cholesterol unless it's filtered, could protect against diabetes, may worsen ulcers....and so on. As for green tea, it has fewer downsides, and some Asians drink an astonishing 1.2 liters a day, it says here. Maybe its anti-oxidants counter all the cigarettes so many people in Asia smoke. But the FDA nixes any explicit health claims for green tea. And more so on...

Hardly anybody with pertinent credentials tries to argue any more that recent climate has not gotten warmer or that greenhouse gases from fossil fuels are not a primary reason. But are things worse than geologically recent, natural ups and downs? That's a different matter.

Yesterday a panel assembled by the National Academies of Sciences said it can only endorse as essentially certain that warmth of recent decades exceeds anything seen for about 400 years, and that greenhouse gases seem to be pushing it toward territory new to modern civilization. But it is less sure about versions of a so-called hockey stick graph of Earth's temperatures that go back 1000 years or more and that indicate a flattish--or even cooling--temperature until people sent it soaring in the last century. Its shape with an upturned hockey stick "blade" in the last half century or so is...

Archeologists from England and France say 100,000-year-old shells excavated from an Israeli cave in the early 1930s, on closer study, now appear to have been part of a necklace. As such, they would be about 25,000 years older than similar shells from South Africa already identified as possible jewelry. If so, reports the NYTimes's John Noble Wilford, they are the oldest known sign of human self-adornment, which in turn indicates a knack for symbolic thinking. Or, as the hed suggests on a story in The Guardian by Alok Jha, they are the "world's oldest bling."

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NY Times John Noble Wilford; The Times (UK) Mark...

The AP's Terence Chea interviewed Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope, who opines that public opinion on climate change has reached a "tipping point" and is toppling toward a broad demand that the government get serious. That's a good enough story, but it mostly provides The Tracker an excuse to plug an insightful review in the June 15 Nature by Gabrielle Walker of tipping point as an overused term du jour (thanks to Malcolm Gladwell). It pops up frequently in global warming stories. Usually its sense is that this or that aspect of the climate machine has gone from being pushed toward a new state, to suddenly rushing toward it due to internal dynamics. That is, it's too late. She says such actual tipping points are hard to find. Her article is in the pay-to-read part of the Nature site, but can be found on the net free with a bit...

This may fall into the "well, duh" category of discovery. But the Toronto Globe and Mail's Scott DeVeau this week reports a study, by University of Connecticut and Elon University researchers, that compared the way young women and young men interpret each other's remarks and manner during conversations. One co-author told him, "Men were more likely to perceive their partner as sexy and flirtatious, but that didn't at all correspond with how she saw him or she saw herself." Seriously, such data probably help inform efforts to corral men who tend toward sexual harassment after they read invitations that don't exist. But still: well, duh.

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Melanoma, the most serious common form of skin cancer, strikes most often in people with light skin that has few ultraviolet ray-absorbing pigments, such as persons of northern European ancestry. It is at them that most health warnings are aimed. But it can happen to anybody. A University of Miami study reports that, perhaps partly on the assumption they don't get the disease, blacks and other dark skinned Americans are much more likely to ignore signs of trouble until it is at an advanced, potentially fatal level. When they do get melanoma, African Americans are more than three times as likely as whites to be diagnosed at a late stage, hispanics nearly twice as likely. The results are in the Archives of Dermatology. They arise from examination of cases in Miami-Dade County.

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The Sacramento Bee's Edie Lau does a bang-up job profiling Arthur Rosenfeld, a state energy commissioner and one of the nation's leading lights on the battle to turn down the lights ... and thermostats, and fridges, and giant SUVs, and everything else that makes Americans such energy pigs. He's a UC Berkeley physicist, was Enrico Fermi's last graduate student, and he's in DC to get the annual Fermi prize. Not much new science in this thing but it's a proper tribute to a good man.

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