So much for global warming's silver lining, one fears. Hopes that more CO2 will act as an airborne fertilizer for crops faded a bit this week after a study by US and Swiss researchers came out in the journal Science. It concludes...
So much for global warming's silver lining, one fears. Hopes that more CO2 will act as an airborne fertilizer for crops faded a bit this week after a study by US and Swiss researchers came out in the journal Science. It concludes that any agricultural boost will be small or nonexistent. In open-air tests -- with predicted elevations in carbon dioxide and also in ozone -- rice, wheat, and soybeans got only half the improvement seen in some earlier greenhouse studies. Maize (corn) and sorghum got none at all. The former trio are C3 plants, the latter two are C4. That's a botanically important distinction. But that is all that the press release says about that. One might suggest to the Univ. of Illinois media team that its press release could well have explained for reporters, however briefly, what the terms mean (they relate to the handling of carbon during photosynthesis and a plant's metabolic and...
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The mammoth flooding along the mid-Atlantic coast of the US naturally triggers the question: is this, like Katrina and like all those melting glaciers and like those altered animal migrations, a sign of global warming? Reuters's ...
The mammoth flooding along the mid-Atlantic coast of the US naturally triggers the question: is this, like Katrina and like all those melting glaciers and like those altered animal migrations, a sign of global warming? Reuters's Jason Szep took that question to a few experts and others. Their answer, of course, is maybe. Much of his story, datelined Boston, revolves around comments by one Harvard authority on climate change and its impacts on health. He also shoehorns a contrarian in there; a commercial meterologist opines that the warming is real, it may be pumping up storms, but natural cycles and not human meddling are to blame. Oh, Right.
Related Storm Science: Boston Globe ...
American kids get too little exercise. Maybe it doesn't take a scientific study to show that children will work hard to have fun, but a professor and his grad student at Indiana...
American kids get too little exercise. Maybe it doesn't take a scientific study to show that children will work hard to have fun, but a professor and his grad student at Indiana State performed one anyway. They velcroed up some kids with heart, respiration, and other monitors and gave them cardboard blocks to play with. Some blocks had three-pound pieces of steel in them. Sure enough, the tykes hefting the weighted blocks worked harder, expended more energy, and pumped their hearts, lungs, and muscles more intensely. The press release mentions only weighted v. nonweighted blocks, but AP's Deanna Martin writes it and throws in three-pound teddy bears and the like. She also finds a few childhood health experts to point out what The Tracker's grandkids prove all the time: kids bam each other with their toys. A padded Pooh with a rock...
A faster, cheaper way to turn plant sugars into feedstock for some plastics and maybe diesel fuel is in the works, say scientists at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Their paper is in Science this...
A faster, cheaper way to turn plant sugars into feedstock for some plastics and maybe diesel fuel is in the works, say scientists at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Their paper is in Science this week and the Journal-Sentinel's Katharine Ott writes it up. Her story is also on the McClatchy-Tribune wire. She even includes enough technical information that a chemical engineer might be able to tell from the piece just what they did. Which is, she explains, to get a high yield of something called 5-hydroxymenthylfurfural from fructose (and how often does something like that make the paper?).
Read it; Also, see Nature.com Philip Ball;...
Chemists at Carnegie-Mellon University's Institute for Green Oxidation Chemistry say they have developed catalysts that, when placed in small quantities in waterways, could radically accelerate the natural breakdown of some "environmental estrogens." These are synthetic chemicals that get loose and mimic estrogen....
Chemists at Carnegie-Mellon University's Institute for Green Oxidation Chemistry say they have developed catalysts that, when placed in small quantities in waterways, could radically accelerate the natural breakdown of some "environmental estrogens." These are synthetic chemicals that get loose and mimic estrogen. They are among the most potent of so-called endocrine disruptors that, many suspect, are wreaking a subtle havoc in the biology of many species of wildlife and perhaps in people as well. Jennifer Bails at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports on the researchers' progress toward such a cleanser, and even gets in some specifics on how their catalysts work. Her story has a narrow focus. But it seems to invite a closer look at both the problem and, more important, possible answers that don't require staggeringly expensive redesign of manufacturing technologies that inherently generate the offending materials as byproducts.
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The NY Times has a running subhed for some of its stories: "The Evolution Debate." It seems most of its science writers have gotten something under this umbrella. (The online story has links to the whole lot.) The topic is not sparked by any doubt whether evolution occurred. It appears to embrace a two-pronged look...
The NY Times has a running subhed for some of its stories: "The Evolution Debate." It seems most of its science writers have gotten something under this umbrella. (The online story has links to the whole lot.) The topic is not sparked by any doubt whether evolution occurred. It appears to embrace a two-pronged look at how religion compels some people to oppose anybody from describing evolution without a nod to theologically-inspired alternatives, and also at legit debates about how it unfolds in nature. Well, enough of this somewhat tedious appreciation of clear vision in science journalism and journalism generally. Today's installment is an intimate portrait by education writer Michael Winerip of one Georgia middle school teacher's stubborn, steady endurance in her incorporation of evolution as the crucial principle in teaching modern biology. She had, it says here, refused to take time for Winerip while she was still teaching. Now she has just retired. In a good...
AP filed yesterday on a story that's been bouncing around for a week or so from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's gray whale monitoring program. AP's story...
AP filed yesterday on a story that's been bouncing around for a week or so from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's gray whale monitoring program. AP's story is largely off a press release and carries no byline. A few other outfits have also filed on it in the last few days. The story does seem to have intriguing, unexplored angles. The essential new fact is that calves spotted migrating with their mothers north past the Central California coast to the Bering Sea and into the Arctic Ocean are up this year over last, and dramatically up over five years ago. This seems to signal the end of a recent slump in reproduction. One hypothesis is that the whales have learned to shift their feeding grounds north, beyond the Bering Strait and into the Arctic Ocean as the sediment-dwelling crustaceans on which they feed shift habitats and...
In the last part of a package on the world wide campaign against malaria, NY Times writer Sharon LaFraniere recounts the stories of a few big businesses that, with their own profitability at stake as workers fell ill, joined African health agencies to fight the deadly scourge. The public-private...
In the last part of a package on the world wide campaign against malaria, NY Times writer Sharon LaFraniere recounts the stories of a few big businesses that, with their own profitability at stake as workers fell ill, joined African health agencies to fight the deadly scourge. The public-private combos, she reports, seem to be working well in at least a few places.
See also earlier posts: 6/28 NYTimes: Big Takeout on World Wide Campaign Against Malaria ; 6/27 ...
A flurry of attention greeted discovery near Luxor early this year of an apparently unlooted ancient burial chamber, which would be the first since King Tut's, by Egyptian and University of Memphis archeologists. But none of the eight...
A flurry of attention greeted discovery near Luxor early this year of an apparently unlooted ancient burial chamber, which would be the first since King Tut's, by Egyptian and University of Memphis archeologists. But none of the eight coffins -- the last opened this week -- carry bodies, and that's a mystery. The delicate, dessicated woven flowers and other funerary items found in the eighth and final one bring some solace to the researchers, it appears.
The NYTimes's Michael Slackman provides insightful color on the showmanship side of Egyptian archeology. It includes the grandiose speculation by the head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities that the chamber, unoccupied though it may be, is actually the tomb of King Tut's mother. This comes after others have supposed it was for Tut's widow. The boy king's name sure is magic in this game. If this were politics, one might...
The return of the bald eagle across much of its US range has become a recurring story in the last few years. The Tribune-Review's...
The return of the bald eagle across much of its US range has become a recurring story in the last few years. The Tribune-Review's Allison M. Heinrichs has another example in the announcement, by Pennslvania wildlife officials, that for the first time in recent memory the number of nesting pairs of the birds in the state exceeds 100.
This is a solid, big story by Celia W. Dugger, first of a two part package on fighting malaria worldwide. It comes a day after the Science Times section profiled the man at W.H.O. in charge of...
This is a solid, big story by Celia W. Dugger, first of a two part package on fighting malaria worldwide. It comes a day after the Science Times section profiled the man at W.H.O. in charge of fighting the scourge, making it in effect a three-part series. Dugger blends heart-rending accounts from visits to clinics in Africa with a fine rundown of the shifting priorities and rising funding, particularly in the US, around malaria. The Bush administration's policies, as well as the suddenly richer Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, come out looking pretty good.
See Also 6/27 Post...
The Tracker well remembers the first big surge of debate over second hand smoke ten years ago or so, and thinking the worries were a hysterical overreach by anti-business consumer health advocates. Then came...
The Tracker well remembers the first big surge of debate over second hand smoke ten years ago or so, and thinking the worries were a hysterical overreach by anti-business consumer health advocates. Then came news that such doubts were being sown by an organized Big Tobacco campaign to discredit reasonably legit science. And now a Republican-administration Surgeon General says, while releasing a 670-page review of data, that the debate is over, second-hand smoke is bad, and the numbers are indisputable. A lot of people have believed this all along. This makes it as official as it gets. It could be killing 50,000 people per year, and that's just Americans. Smokers even in their own homes are committing a terrible mistake to light up around kids, it says here. Lots of ink on this, and a fair number of multiple bylines. Even in Kentucky, a tobacco state, health officials are...
Sometimes synchronicity just beats one into submission. The Tracker didn't bite on an AP story about a company that is patenting lower calorie, lower fat burgers by mixing meat with soy products....
Sometimes synchronicity just beats one into submission. The Tracker didn't bite on an AP story about a company that is patenting lower calorie, lower fat burgers by mixing meat with soy products. And also not on another AP story on the decision by one hamburger vendor, the corporate parent of Hardee's and Carl's Jr., to defy all those preachy health nuts and to promote proudly the biggest, sloppiest, mouth-wateringest greasebombs one can imagine and call them monster thickburgers or some such. Both are, after all, just business stories. But when a yarn in the Akron Beacon Journal by food writer Jane Snow hit the radar about how local guys there invented the hamburger in the first place and that it's entirely whacked to flatten the patty with a spatula, well okay then, the fat's in the fire. Tuck into some burgers.
Stories:...
Not much science here. Nor much text in most accounts. But it's not often that one sees "gobsmacked" in the US press, and not this time either actually. That's in The Scotsman. It seems some...
Not much science here. Nor much text in most accounts. But it's not often that one sees "gobsmacked" in the US press, and not this time either actually. That's in The Scotsman. It seems some freaked-out workers in a furniture restoration plant in Wales darned near took a hammer to a 2.6-inch-long Capricorn long-horned beetle that, the UK press generally agrees, is the first in the country to be seen in 300 years. They didn't smash it, and now plan to put it on display. The Western Mail newspaper in Cardiff is credited in several accounts for the first story which, under Sally Williams's byline, says the beetle had not been seen for a mere century.
Stories:
The Sun;...
The World Wildlife Fund reports that one of its consultants, a German researcher deep in a Borneo wilderness, put a reddish-brown snake in a bucket. When he looked at it a little later, it was white. Thus was discovered a rare case of...
The World Wildlife Fund reports that one of its consultants, a German researcher deep in a Borneo wilderness, put a reddish-brown snake in a bucket. When he looked at it a little later, it was white. Thus was discovered a rare case of a snake with chameleon-like ability to change colors. It's being called the Kapuas Mud Snake, a new and poisonous species in the genus Enhydris. Its talent for camouflage may be why it evaded scientific notice till recently. The change in albedo may also help the snake regulate its temperature. AP and Reuters ran the story briefly and to wide pick-up and each with no byline; it appears they rewrote it straight off the press release. More ambitious is John Pickrell of New Scientist, who gets an extra quote but, more useful, includes a reference to the December, 2005 journal publication of the discovery. That paper, linked below, is notable because the...
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