Yesterday I noticed a burble of news coverage on the NASA Mars Rover Curiosity as it prepares to drill for the first time into a rock to see what it's made of - roundup below but not quite yet.
Drilling was supposed to have begun as early as today but so far not much...
Yesterday I noticed a burble of news coverage on the NASA Mars Rover Curiosity as it prepares to drill for the first time into a rock to see what it's made of - roundup below but not quite yet.
Drilling was supposed to have begun as early as today but so far not much coverage of the actual event. NASA says any day now. But the event prompts thought of an issue in Mars news. It does seem - without checking, an important qualification of the oncoming opinion - that media coverage for Curiosity has been far short of what the smaller, twin Rovers Spirit and Opportunity received after their arrival on Mars nine years ago. Specialty outlets such as space.com pay steady attention to the newer, better, and atomic energy powered machine, but not so much the big wire services, big newspapers, BBC and Wired and Grist and Scientific American and other general-purpose science news outlets.
I've queried the Jet Propulsion Lab news...
When I called in a recent post for better reporting on gun control, I didn't realize how very desperately we would need it this week.
Newsweek has put its respected brand...
When I called in a recent post for better reporting on gun control, I didn't realize how very desperately we would need it this week.
Newsweek has put its respected brand name on a piece of unsubstantiated opinion the likes of which we haven't seen since Newsweek ran a similar piece of unsubstantiated ire criticizing Barack Obama during the presidential campaign.
The new piece is a white-hot eruption on the evils of gun control written by the playwright David Mamet, whose anger and passion is so intense that if he proclaimed this in a theater you'd be able to see the spittle settling like gentle rain...
The Washington Post is fiddling with a potentially game-changing piece of software that promises to fact-check political speeches and other public statements in real time automatically, with no help from fallible human fact-checkers.
The key word here is "promise." Called...
The Washington Post is fiddling with a potentially game-changing piece of software that promises to fact-check political speeches and other public statements in real time automatically, with no help from fallible human fact-checkers.
The key word here is "promise." Called Truth Teller, the gadget has a long way to go before it fulfills that promise, if these demos are any indication.
Before I go any further, I should note that I have enough conflicts-of-interest in the writing of this item that I should probably kill this post and go home. According to the Knight Digital Media Center at the University of Southern California (Knight supports the Tracker), Truth Teller was developed with a Knight News Prototype Grant (ugh, Knight again...
Much has been said recently about the possibility of cloning a Neanderthal, now that the Neanderthal's genome has been sequenced. Mistaken reports in recent days claimed that a Harvard researcher, George Church, was searching for an adventurous woman to become the surrogate mother of a Neanderthal baby. Those...
Much has been said recently about the possibility of cloning a Neanderthal, now that the Neanderthal's genome has been sequenced. Mistaken reports in recent days claimed that a Harvard researcher, George Church, was searching for an adventurous woman to become the surrogate mother of a Neanderthal baby. Those stories were debunked by a number of science reporters, including Faye Flam here on the Tracker.
Tabitha M. Powledge, who likes to find a theme for each weekly edition of her On Science Blogs, wrapped last Friday's post around Neanderthals and Denisovans, the more recently discovered relatives of Homo sapiens. While praising science bloggers generally for correcting the misleading stories about George Church, she expresses some...
Bora Zivkovic was born in Belgrade, Serbia when it was still Yugoslavia, but he was born again into the world of science blogging. As one of the founders of the annual Science Online conference (or unconference, as they like to call it), an editor at Scientific American, a prolific...
Bora Zivkovic was born in Belgrade, Serbia when it was still Yugoslavia, but he was born again into the world of science blogging. As one of the founders of the annual Science Online conference (or unconference, as they like to call it), an editor at Scientific American, a prolific blogger himself, and the author of 111,418 tweets as of this morning, Zivkovic uses, understands and pushes the boundaries of the science blogging world as well as anyone.
So when he decides to assess the current state of blog commenting, it's worth paying attention.
In a substantial post at Scientific American, he begins with a word or two on the recent article in which researchers say they found that found that uncivil comments can...
Three months after Sandy, many of the news media have settled on Superstorm Sandy as the way to describe the storm that ravaged the Northeast and elsewhere in early November.
I've had enough of "superstorm" and its tabloid connotations. What was the thing actually called? And what should...
Three months after Sandy, many of the news media have settled on Superstorm Sandy as the way to describe the storm that ravaged the Northeast and elsewhere in early November.
I've had enough of "superstorm" and its tabloid connotations. What was the thing actually called? And what should the press call it?
On January 15, 2010, the National Weather Service fell into line with other member countries of the World Meteorological Organization by agreeing to call such storms "post-tropical cyclones." And it defined the term, in a release in an all-caps text file that looks as though it came over an old AP teletype sometime around 1942:
A FORMER TROPICAL CYCLONE. THIS GENERIC TERM DESCRIBES A CYCLONE THAT NO LONGER POSSESSES SUFFICIENT TROPICAL CHARACTERISTICS TO BE CONSIDERED A TROPICAL CYCLONE. ...
On Sunday, the Discovery Channel will show the first video of the giant squid in its natural habitat, at 8pm/7 central. I'm not generally inclined to post TV listings at the Tracker, but this one intrigues me. I read Jules Verne's "20,...
On Sunday, the Discovery Channel will show the first video of the giant squid in its natural habitat, at 8pm/7 central. I'm not generally inclined to post TV listings at the Tracker, but this one intrigues me. I read Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" as a kid, and I saw the Disney movie starring James Mason as Capt. Nemo, and I've been intrigued by the giant squid ever since. (Wikipedia describes the film as an early example of steampunk. This observation is in parentheses because it has nothing whatever to do with what I'm talking about.)
It turns out that the giant squid is a shiny silver color, making it look in real life more like some robotic demon than it did in the illustrations that generally accompany Verne's tale. Arikia Millikan has...
So a precise slice of the area around Shippingport, PA, got a few inches of snow the other day. Accuweather's Jillian MacMath...
So a precise slice of the area around Shippingport, PA, got a few inches of snow the other day. Accuweather's Jillian MacMath explains rather neatly why. Upwind is a nuclear power complex, Beaver Valley Nuclear Power Station, and not far from that the coal-burning Mansfield Power Plant. Altogether, five cooling towers were belching plenty of steam into the sky. The result, due to collision of hot moist air with supercold drier air at altitude, resembles a Lake Effect snow only more concentrated in area. A Doppler radar image by the Nat'l Weather Service revealed a distinct, narrow plume of snow stretching downwind. An inversion effect that kept the plume entrained, it says here, enhanced the effect.
This got lots of local...
Yesterday morning, before discovering that our MIT website was downed by a hacker attack to honor some other now dead-by-suicide hacker I could not recall hearing of, an AP story caught my eye. It sent me on a wander through my vast trove of rss feeds that supposedly carry science, enviro, energy, and...
Yesterday morning, before discovering that our MIT website was downed by a hacker attack to honor some other now dead-by-suicide hacker I could not recall hearing of, an AP story caught my eye. It sent me on a wander through my vast trove of rss feeds that supposedly carry science, enviro, energy, and medical stories to find others that don't seem to have given the science its due. With the site back in halting action, cautiously we venture forward....
(*AMENDMENT (Jan 24): See comments below for clear evidence I should have learned a little more about internet and rss history, and about the tragedy and issues behind the attack on MIT, before so casually referring to that cyber-incident./ CP )
The first story is a terrific yarn in itself:
If Boeing is having trouble with the batteries in its 787 Dreamliners, it is not alone. "As 21st century technology strains to become ever faster, cleaner and cheaper, an invention from more than 200 years ago keeps holding it back,"...
If Boeing is having trouble with the batteries in its 787 Dreamliners, it is not alone. "As 21st century technology strains to become ever faster, cleaner and cheaper, an invention from more than 200 years ago keeps holding it back," writes the AP's Seth Borenstein. That invention would be the battery. "It's why electric cars aren't clogging the roads and why Boeing's new ultra-efficient 787 Dreamliners aren't flying high," he continues.
He reminds us that in 2006 and 2007, "more than 46 million cell-phone batteries and 10 million laptop batteries--all lithium-ion--were recalled because of the risk of overheating, short-circuiting, and exploding." It almost makes you want to scrap your lithium-powered laptop for one of the old steam-powered models of yesteryear.
Borenstein...
What reader could resist clicking on a headline about a mad scientist trying to find women to carry Neanderthal clones? It sounds like something from the old supermarket tabloid the Weekly World News, but this latest whopper is loosely based on a real statement by a real scientist.
In his book,...
What reader could resist clicking on a headline about a mad scientist trying to find women to carry Neanderthal clones? It sounds like something from the old supermarket tabloid the Weekly World News, but this latest whopper is loosely based on a real statement by a real scientist.
In his book, Regenesis, written with Ed Regis, Harvard researcher George Church really did say that it might be possible to clone Neanderthal babies using the Neanderthal genome sequence reconstructed with synthetic biology. And the kicker: A cloned embryo of our extinct cousin could be gestated by an “adventurous” woman. (On the plus side, the first volunteer would be shoe-in to get her own reality show.)
There wasn’t much reaction at first. The statement was buried pretty deep in the book, which was something of a slog to read.
But then the German magazine...
On Jan. 4, I posted on an article in Science by Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele of the University of Wisconsin in which they prepared a...
On Jan. 4, I posted on an article in Science by Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele of the University of Wisconsin in which they prepared a balanced news report about nanotechnology and showed it to two groups of readers. One group saw civil comments; the other saw uncivil comments and name-calling. "Disturbingly, readers' interpretations of potential risks associated with the technology described in the news article differed significantly depending only on the tone of the manipulated reader comments posted with the story," they wrote.
The story did not get much pickup initially, but it has since ricocheted around the web, generating a lot of discussion that Gary Schwitzer has collected in a post...
What's the best way to give someone a raise? A $1,000 boost in salary, or an immediate $2,000 bonus?
Does coaching managers make them better? What's the best way to encourage employees to contribute to an IRA? How long should the line be at the cafeteria, and why? How much maternity leave is enough?...
What's the best way to give someone a raise? A $1,000 boost in salary, or an immediate $2,000 bonus?
Does coaching managers make them better? What's the best way to encourage employees to contribute to an IRA? How long should the line be at the cafeteria, and why? How much maternity leave is enough? What is the best way to maximize an employee's happiness?
And why is Google regularly ranked as the best place to work?
The answer: Because it pursues scientific answers to all of these questions.
In a piece entitled "The Happiness Machine" at Slate, Farhad Manjoo gets a good look inside Google to see how it works its magic with employees and their managers. He interviews the head of Google's People Operations, or POPS, a part of the...
Today's Science Times in The New York Times carries a new column of briefs, a recap of some of the past week's science news. The Week, as it's called, is...
Today's Science Times in The New York Times carries a new column of briefs, a recap of some of the past week's science news. The Week, as it's called, is written by Jennifer A. Kingson, whose Twitter account identifies her as a science editor at the Times.
In a brief intro, Kingson hints that she will skip the major stories of the week in favor of the "developments, from the quirky to the abstruse, [that] often make their way into the daily news cycle, depending on the strength of the research behind them. (Well, that’s how we judge them, anyway.)"
She quotes an anonymous colleague (why anonymous?) who said, "In a way, science is antithetical to everything that has to do with a newspaper...
A few things I chanced to spot this week:
--I've been arguing for more coverage of guns and gun control by science writers, and so I'm happy to see that Tom Avril at The Philadelphia Inquirer...
A few things I chanced to spot this week:
--I've been arguing for more coverage of guns and gun control by science writers, and so I'm happy to see that Tom Avril at The Philadelphia Inquirer has taken a look at the evidence for and against gun-control laws. In one sense, it's an easy story to write--because there isn't much evidence one way or the other, Avril reports. He explains why.
--The New York Times has at times seemed either confused or obsessed--or both--about yoga, as I've mentioned here and here. At the end of December, I finally gave the Times a thumbs-up for what I thought, for a change,...
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