On Monday, a massive tornado plowed a near 20-mile path through suburbs of Oklahoma City, killing dozens of people and destroying entire neighborhoods. My purpose in writing about it here at the Tracker is to take a look at the ways that...
21May 2013
On Monday, a massive tornado plowed a near 20-mile path through suburbs of Oklahoma City, killing dozens of people and destroying entire neighborhoods. My purpose in writing about it here at the Tracker is to take a look at the ways that science writers helped illuminate the power of that storm. But stories of big storms are always first stories of devastated lives and I'd like to start by extending the sympathy and best wishes of all of us here to people in those damaged communities.
The tornado that struck in the region of Moore, Oklahoma yesterday was reportedly as much as a mile wide at points and reached peak wind speeds that topped 200 miles an hour. According to the National Weather Service, that classifies it as an EF-4 tornado on the widely accepted...
[Updates with more European junkets being promoted by the European Union of Science Journalists' Associations.]
"As one of the most prestigious competitions of its kind, the European Inventor Award each year pays tribute to the creativity of inventors, whose quest for new ideas drives...
[Updates with more European junkets being promoted by the European Union of Science Journalists' Associations.]
"As one of the most prestigious competitions of its kind, the European Inventor Award each year pays tribute to the creativity of inventors, whose quest for new ideas drives technological progress and economic growth, shapes our society and improves our daily lives," says an announcement directed at British science writers.
That's a story that might be worth covering. The award ceremony will be held in Amsterdam next week, not a terribly long or expensive trip for British journalists.
But they needn't worry about the price of the trip or their lodging.
The European Patent Office and the European Journalism Centre say they "will cover the travel and accommodation costs....
Maybe it's just me, but I can't get enough of Sandra G. Boodman's medical mysteries in The Washington Post. I'd like to see a collection of these, maybe as a Kindle single, so I could have them all in one place.
Boodman was...
Maybe it's just me, but I can't get enough of Sandra G. Boodman's medical mysteries in The Washington Post. I'd like to see a collection of these, maybe as a Kindle single, so I could have them all in one place.
Boodman was back again yesterday with a tale that was not only a mystery, but an outrage. I'm tempted to use a familiar vulgar phrase to describe my reaction, but that would be impolite. The doctors who saw 16-year-old Allison Partridge let her down, and there ought to be some sort of punishment for that. Maybe require them to attend 10-week remedial sessions to watch videos of her condition before they are allowed to practice again?
Even specialists failed to recognize what was going on....
Chemical & Engineering News, known for its coverage of research, business, the chemical industry, and related industries, is not known for 10,000-word stories looking at social issues. In the current issue, however, Lisa M. Jarvis tackles the orphan drug problem in...
Chemical & Engineering News, known for its coverage of research, business, the chemical industry, and related industries, is not known for 10,000-word stories looking at social issues. In the current issue, however, Lisa M. Jarvis tackles the orphan drug problem in a long, comprehensive piece with a surprising turn: Orphan drugs, it seems, are no longer orphans. The headline on the piece is "Orphans Find a Home."
That's not true for all of them, but it's true for a growing number, as pharmaceutical and biotech companies, and investors, suddenly see that producing drugs for a disease that affects only a few thousand patients can be a potent money maker. This has not always been true, which is why orphan drugs were orphaned. Pharmaceutical companies were looking for drugs such as Lipitor that they could sell to millions of people. Now,...
Laura Beil at Science News begins her helpful survey of fructose research with an interesting historical footnote. She reports that two chemists found an enzyme that could turn...
Laura Beil at Science News begins her helpful survey of fructose research with an interesting historical footnote. She reports that two chemists found an enzyme that could turn glucose from cornstarch into fructose, which is sweeter. What's interesting is that the discovery was published in Science in 1957, Beil reports, and largely ignored. It was not until the 1970s that Japanese researchers learned how to use the finding to produce fructose on an industrial scale. And it was not until 2004, she writes, that consumers began to be concerned.
Beil does a nice job of looking over the research on whether fructose might be, as critics, claim, particularly harmful to health--worse than sugar, or sucrose, produced from sugar cane. As I read the story, it seems to say that there is evidence of harm from fructose, because of how it affects the...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) This Knight Tracker participated last Thu and Fri in the 7th Ibero-American conference of science journalism in Ecuador. With more than 400 attendees and excellent dialogs, the event was a great success. But the tracker felt that apart from words, more action is needed. Many...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) This Knight Tracker participated last Thu and Fri in the 7th Ibero-American conference of science journalism in Ecuador. With more than 400 attendees and excellent dialogs, the event was a great success. But the tracker felt that apart from words, more action is needed. Many students of journalism came to the tracker with sincere interest in science communication. We need to build specific capacitation and opportunities for them and for journalists working already in the media. Especially now that Ecuadorian government is increasing its investment in science and building Yachay City of Knowledge; an ambitious project aimed to promote scientific research and innovation and to create a knowledge-based economy in Ecuador.
El pasado jueves y viernes participé en el VII seminario iberoamericano de periodismo científico que se celebr...
"I expected lots of blog posts about Angelina Jolie's double mastectomy," Tabitha M. Powledge writes at On Science Blogs. "I didn't expect the torrent we're getting. My unscientific...
"I expected lots of blog posts about Angelina Jolie's double mastectomy," Tabitha M. Powledge writes at On Science Blogs. "I didn't expect the torrent we're getting. My unscientific impression is that this is the single most-blogged-about medical topic I've looked at since I began writing On Science Blogs in 2009, going on 5 years ago."
Why would that be, we might ask? "Even in mad mediaworld this is an extraordinarily potent mix, involving a super-celebrity superstar who always makes news and sometimes scandal (and whose equally high-profile partner, here somewhat in the background, does ditto), plus women's breasts (two of them), plus breast reconstructive surgery, plus a cancer that is irrationally terrifying, and all of this soaked in a subtext of sex sex sex." Trenchant, n'est-ce pas? By the way, Powledge titles...
This is not a news story but it got my mind into a perplexed state. That is, until I realized it might be that the question is not the right question the American ear wants to hear:
- The Curious Wavefunction (Scientific American Blogs) - Ashutosh Jogalekar...
This is not a news story but it got my mind into a perplexed state. That is, until I realized it might be that the question is not the right question the American ear wants to hear:
- The Curious Wavefunction (Scientific American Blogs) - Ashutosh Jogalekar: Who's the greatest American physicist in history?
The writer is a chemist with a biotech company in Massachusetts. His blog site is serious and sober. This essay on top US physicists is worth reading mainly because his personal answer is a name few of us in the ksjtracker community, even the physics writers, have ever heard of and even those who have won't likely have much to say. But its muscle comes from noting that while the list of illustrious American-born physicists is pretty long (...
Nothing like an alert editor and an enterprising reporter on hand to get the jump on an interesting, if not Earth-shaking in either metaphorical or actual meaning, excloo for one's outlet.
Here it is in two outlets, its primary publisher first and one that picked it up with full attribution...
Nothing like an alert editor and an enterprising reporter on hand to get the jump on an interesting, if not Earth-shaking in either metaphorical or actual meaning, excloo for one's outlet.
Here it is in two outlets, its primary publisher first and one that picked it up with full attribution
- Nature (News and Comment) Richard A. Lovett: Polar Wander linked to climate change / Melting ice in Greenland may have helped to shift the location of the North Pole ; and at Scientific American: Climate change Has Shifted the Locations of Earth's North and South Poles ;
The news: A paper is now in the accepted-for-publication queue at Geophysical Research...
"Does the fate of a tiny, quizzical, picky, jaunty, crimson-eyed, migrating, night-flying, snail-eating, lagoon-living and horribly threatened water bird that lives only in the outback of Patagonia matter?"
That's the question Alanna Mitchell...
"Does the fate of a tiny, quizzical, picky, jaunty, crimson-eyed, migrating, night-flying, snail-eating, lagoon-living and horribly threatened water bird that lives only in the outback of Patagonia matter?"
That's the question Alanna Mitchell asks as she begins the first part of a gracefully written, two-part series on the hooded grebe of Patagonia. Mitchell, a Canadian journalist, lives almost as far from Patagonia, at the tip of South America, as one can be. What, she wonders, could the bird mean to Canadians?
If we, like the ancient Sisters of Fate, snip the hooded grebe’s thread of life, killing off a creature that painstakingly, chaotically, maybe randomly evolved over billions of years from a single-celled entity to a heart-tuggingly beautiful bird with a scarlet crest, are we diminished? Or here’s another thought: are we at risk too...
Gary Schwitzer is confused, as he explains in HealthNewsReview.org. And I don't blame him; I'm confused myself. ...
Gary Schwitzer is confused, as he explains in HealthNewsReview.org. And I don't blame him; I'm confused myself.
Was this week's human cloning story a "major medical breakthrough," as Fox called it (the b-word!)? Or not?
Scanning the coverage doesn't help; you can find either point of view well represented.
First, FoxNews.com: "In a major medical breakthrough, researchers at the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) have for the first time ever successfully converted human skin cells into embryonic stem cells – via a technique called...
A strange kind of time shifting is going on at The New York Times, which I guess I'm not complaining about, because the result is more coverage of science.
Last week, the science writer Carl Zimmer began a weekly column in the Times, but not...
A strange kind of time shifting is going on at The New York Times, which I guess I'm not complaining about, because the result is more coverage of science.
Last week, the science writer Carl Zimmer began a weekly column in the Times, but not in Tuesday's Science Times. Instead, it appears on Thursdays, when it is less likely to be seen, I would wager. Last week's debut column concerned the 17-year cicadas, now appearing on fence posts and in trees in the Northeast and as far south as North Carolina. Today's is on some of the genes that were crucial in the transformation from wolves to dogs. The column leads the science page on the...
On Monday, the generic-drug-maker Ranbaxy pleaded guilty to federal drug safety violations and was ordered to pay a fine of $500 million to "resolve claims that it sold subpar drugs and made false statements to the Food and Drug Administration about its manufacturing practices at two factories in India,...
On Monday, the generic-drug-maker Ranbaxy pleaded guilty to federal drug safety violations and was ordered to pay a fine of $500 million to "resolve claims that it sold subpar drugs and made false statements to the Food and Drug Administration about its manufacturing practices at two factories in India," according to a story by Katie Thomas in The New York Times.
Thomas reported that Ranbaxy "acknowledged that it failed to conduct proper safety and quality tests of several drugs manufactured at the Indian plants, including generic versions of many common medicines, like gabapentin, which treats epilepsy and nerve pain, and the antibiotic ciprofloxacin."
That's disturbing, but it sounds like the kind of thing that can be corrected with proper oversight.
But I didn'...
(English intor to Spanih lang post) Researchers at Oregon University have successfully used cloning techniques to create human embryonic stem cells. Spanish newspapers classified the achievement as a scientific milestone, and it's been the main story in the front page of some print editions. Reporters made...
(English intor to Spanih lang post) Researchers at Oregon University have successfully used cloning techniques to create human embryonic stem cells. Spanish newspapers classified the achievement as a scientific milestone, and it's been the main story in the front page of some print editions. Reporters made a great job searching for opinions of Spanish scientists and comparing the possibilities of human embryonic stem cells with IPS cells. Everybody avoided yellow press about reproductive cloning and talked only about therapeutic cloning. We missed more detailed information about the methods used by the Oregon team, in order to understand why this time the cloning was successful. We’ve tracked the main Latin American newspapers. The story occupied the front page in Argentina, Peru, Brazil and Chile, and has not even appeared in other important outlets. In Spain, many reporters highlighted that one member of the Oregon team is a young Spanish...
People hate it when the doctors and medical reporters give them conflicting signals on what they should or shouldn’t eat. The press certainly met the public’s low expectations this week, with Healthday admonishing us that “Most Americans Should Eat Less Salt,” The New York Times...
People hate it when the doctors and medical reporters give them conflicting signals on what they should or shouldn’t eat. The press certainly met the public’s low expectations this week, with Healthday admonishing us that “Most Americans Should Eat Less Salt,” The New York Times reporting that there’s "No Benefit Seen in Sharp Limits on Salt in Diet,” and The New York Daily News advising us to “Go Ahead and Order that Side of Fries.” All these, remarkably, stemmed from the very same Institute of Medicine report.
Many stories quoted “experts” saying they stand by old recommendations that we should aim for no more than 1500 mg a day, but the Times actually quotes the chair of the IOM report saying that some people may suffer risks if they get less than 2,300 mg a day. Those risks include “...
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