We've received several messages asking what happened to the daily Tracker email alerts.
Yes, they're gone, lost in a move to a new server. We're working to get them up and running again as soon as possible.
Well, that's not quite right. None of us at the Tracker...
We've received several messages asking what happened to the daily Tracker email alerts.
Yes, they're gone, lost in a move to a new server. We're working to get them up and running again as soon as possible.
Well, that's not quite right. None of us at the Tracker is doing anything except to periodically send short notes to the computer people deep within MIT, who say they are "actively working on this issue."
Wish us luck. And thanks for noticing.
-Paul Raeburn
Johns Hopkins has closed its graduate science-writing program, alerting alumni in an e-mail that there will be no class next year. The program's director, ...
Johns Hopkins has closed its graduate science-writing program, alerting alumni in an e-mail that there will be no class next year. The program's director, Ann Finkbeiner, has resigned from the university.
The program has long been recognized as one of the top science-writing graduate programs in the country, along with others at NYU, Boston University, UC Santa Cruz, Columbia, and MIT. Finkbeiner told me in an email that she began teaching there about 1988 and became the program's director around 2000, although she was never a full-time Hopkins employee.
Finkbeiner told Michael Price...
As regular tracker readers surely all know, something is killing off honey bees across large stretches of the world including North America and Europe. Nobody has shown overwhelming evidence of a specific reason for this die-back, aka colony collapse disorder. But agricultural commissioners in the European Union...
As regular tracker readers surely all know, something is killing off honey bees across large stretches of the world including North America and Europe. Nobody has shown overwhelming evidence of a specific reason for this die-back, aka colony collapse disorder. But agricultural commissioners in the European Union moved this week against one of the prime suspects: a class of pesticides used widely on crops. Farmers soon, if this sticks, will have a hard time getting permits to use these "neonicotinoid" formulations on crops that attract the world's most common pollinating livestock.
The expected ban is not as sweeping as some agri-environmentalists hoped and lacked a strong enough vote to be open-ended in time, therefore is to be in force for two years. It fits generally under the precautionary principle - a tenet of low-risk living. It has more adherents in European governing circles than in those of the US. It means better safe than...
We surely live in remarkable times, when, only a month after Time magazine won the war on cancer, The Telegraph has now cured HIV.
"Researchers believe that there will be a...
We surely live in remarkable times, when, only a month after Time magazine won the war on cancer, The Telegraph has now cured HIV.
"Researchers believe that there will be a breakthrough in finding a cure for HIV 'within months,'" the paper screams under the headline "Scientists on brink of HIV cure."
Danish scientists "are conducting clinical trials to test a 'novel strategy' in which the HIV virus is stripped from human DNA and destroyed permanently by the immune system," writes Jake Wallis Simons. Well, we can't ask for any more than that--HIV permanently destroyed.
The idea, Simons reports, is to release HIV from "reservoirs it forms...
[Update 5/3/13: The Max Planck Institute has released a statement saying that the film is not a documentary, and that the filmmakers intercut different sequences and used different individuals to tell a story that is scientifically accurate. I'm relying on...
[Update 5/3/13: The Max Planck Institute has released a statement saying that the film is not a documentary, and that the filmmakers intercut different sequences and used different individuals to tell a story that is scientifically accurate. I'm relying on a web translation of the German language release.]
A film commissioned by The Walt Disney Company called "Chimpanzees," released in the U.S. a year ago and just now opening in Germany, tells the touching story of an orphaned chimp who was saved by a small male who wandered by and adopted him. It is "a true, one-of-a-kind story that could be written only by nature," the German language press kit says, according to an article...
Sexual harassment by researchers during field expeditions is surprisingly common, with 21 percent of women in a new survey reporting that they had experienced "physical sexual harassment or unwanted sexual contact."
Kathryn Clancy, a bioanthropologist at the University of Illinois, has been...
Sexual harassment by researchers during field expeditions is surprisingly common, with 21 percent of women in a new survey reporting that they had experienced "physical sexual harassment or unwanted sexual contact."
Kathryn Clancy, a bioanthropologist at the University of Illinois, has been using her Scientific America blog (where she goes by Kate) to report confidential interviews with women who say they've been sexually harassed in the field and generally told that any attempt for redress against the perpetrators could destroy their careers. Most have chosen not to name names.
Most recently, she spoke at an ethics panel at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists about a survey in which she and her colleagues found alarming rates of sexual harassment occurring during field research. Clancy...
It's a useful exercise to try to figure out why the Tsarnaev brothers did what they did at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, but to Joel Breuklander, such efforts...
It's a useful exercise to try to figure out why the Tsarnaev brothers did what they did at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, but to Joel Breuklander, such efforts can too easily sound like sympathy for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, or "a conservative parody of mush-headed liberal thinking." As the subhed on Breuklander's post says, "Pressure from an older brother is no excuse for murder."
But at On Science Blogs, Tabitha M. Powledge is not letting Breuklander get away with this. "Some of the ideas that so exasperate Breuklander might qualify as scientific hypotheses about what lay behind the Boston Marathon bombings and their aftermath," she writes. Pressure from an older brother is...
A glance at that plot up there shows there's no surprise upon learning that CO2 is on the brink of 400 parts per million in the air tht you and I, plus all the coal CEOs in the world and all the tree huggers who despise what those rich guys do for a living, are sucking into their lungs. That is the famous curve...
A glance at that plot up there shows there's no surprise upon learning that CO2 is on the brink of 400 parts per million in the air tht you and I, plus all the coal CEOs in the world and all the tree huggers who despise what those rich guys do for a living, are sucking into their lungs. That is the famous curve amassed for the last 55 years by the Keelings of UC San Diego's Scripps Institution, starting with the late Dave (Charles D) Keeling and continued by his son Ralph , on the flank of Hawaii's Mauna Loa shield volcano (CORRECTION NOTE: initial brain fade id'd it on next volcano over, Mauna Kea).
It's up from about 280 ppm before burning coal got popular in Britain and soon after that all over the industrializing world. It was at 316 when the observatory started work in the late 50s with the fervid backing of the towering climate chemist and, eventually, climate change worrier Roger Revelle.
...
I've commented several times here on the surprising run of psychology and health stories in The New York Times Magazine, which has clearly made these a regular feature of the magazine now. But the...
I've commented several times here on the surprising run of psychology and health stories in The New York Times Magazine, which has clearly made these a regular feature of the magazine now. But the Times topped that yesterday, with a special issue on health, featuring stories on breast cancer awareness, bipolar disorder, and a case of fraudulent psychological research.
Interestingly, this has not been matched by a rise in science stories. We're not seeing a similar increase in stories on exoplanets, the Higgs boson, climate change, software, or habitat loss. The Times is observing what has long been the rift between what we would call medical stories (including psychology) and science stories. We might take this opportunity to alert the magazine's editors to the gripping stories they...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) Last week The Lancet Oncology published an extensive study about cancer control in Latin America. It's a terryfic work, and it was even ...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) Last week The Lancet Oncology published an extensive study about cancer control in Latin America. It's a terryfic work, and it was even published open access in Spanish. The main message is that there are far fewer cases of cancer in the region than in the US or Europe, but the proportion who die is much higher. Important also: cancer cases are rising threateningly fast. The study discusses late diagnosis and inequality in access to treatment. It compares rural and urban areas, indigenous and no indigenous people, and health care systems in the region. It talks about specific risk factors like indoor pollution from burning solid fuels, and it gives plenty of data from all the...
This morning, the Discover blogger Keith Kloor filed a noisy objection to...
This morning, the Discover blogger Keith Kloor filed a noisy objection to a Reuters story on a questionable paper alleging harmful effects from Roundup, the trade name of glyphosate, a widely used pesticide from Monsanto.
As Kloor points out, the paper charges that the illnesses "to which glyphosate could plausibly contribute, through its known biosemiotic effects, include inflammatory bowel disease, obesity, depression, ADHD, autism, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, ALS, multiple sclerosis, cancer, cachexia,...
Here's one of the consequences of the new health reform law you might have missed: The number of people seeking treatment for addiction could double, depending upon how many states expand Medicaid programs and how many addicts take advantage of them.
And for many of them, there will be no place to go....
Here's one of the consequences of the new health reform law you might have missed: The number of people seeking treatment for addiction could double, depending upon how many states expand Medicaid programs and how many addicts take advantage of them.
And for many of them, there will be no place to go. "In more than two thirds of the states, treatment clinics are already at or approaching 100 percent capacity," writes Carla K. Johnson (photo) of The Associated Press. That comes from a piece in which Johnson compared federal government data on addiction rates in the 50 states, the capacity of existing treatment programs, and the provisions of the new healthcare law.
The surge of new patients is "expected to push a marginal part of the health care system out of church...
In a commentary in the British newspaper The Guardian, Katherine Stewart asks why state legislatures are moving rightward while the...
In a commentary in the British newspaper The Guardian, Katherine Stewart asks why state legislatures are moving rightward while the population of the U.S. "continues to trend moderately leftward."
Her answer: smart, targeted donations from right-wing donors.
She writes:
Alabama, Tennessee, North Dakota, and Mississippi are among the latest to impose unprecedented restrictions on women's access to abortion services. All told, in the first three months of this year, 694 provisions related to reproductive health have come before state legislatures, more than half of them involving abortion restrictions.
We are seeing a similar surge of opposition to science education: in Missouri, Montana, Colorado, and Oklahoma, legislators...
Raindrops keep falling and the next thing you know the neighborhood is full of water and deputies in boats are yelling "evacuate!" It's always good to get that warning sooner than that. The sequestration as illustration of America's legislative face-plant got attention today (Thur Apr 25)...
Raindrops keep falling and the next thing you know the neighborhood is full of water and deputies in boats are yelling "evacuate!" It's always good to get that warning sooner than that. The sequestration as illustration of America's legislative face-plant got attention today (Thur Apr 25) from the Associated Press. Its prolific science writer Seth Borenstein highlighted an announcement from the US Geological Survey that budget cuts appear poised to force closure of many stream and river gauges nationwide. About 100 of these these automated sentinels are located where they are vital if communities, farmers, and others are to get warning of flooding and thus reduce loss of life and of property damage. Particularly in the flatter parts of this country where flood plains can reach well into or clean across riverside towns, not to...
According to an article Tuesday in The Philadelphia Inquirer by Don Sapatkin, the story of the AIDS epidemic's "patient zero" was "sordid...
According to an article Tuesday in The Philadelphia Inquirer by Don Sapatkin, the story of the AIDS epidemic's "patient zero" was "sordid tabloid fare" created by a book publicist to hype the 1987 book And the Band Played On by the journalist Randy Shilts.
Whether or not this charge is fair, there is a bit more to the story.
Patient zero was identified by researchers as a man who had sex with multiple male partners on his travels across the U.S., inoculating them with HIV and accelerating the epidemic. Shilts, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle,...
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