Thirty eight deaths from one disease usually don't even register on a developing nation's health stats, but if it's bird flu, standards shift. With 38 deaths, second to the 42 in Vietnam where stern measures have prevented any deaths at all this year, Indonesia's response has been disorganized and underfinanced,...
Thirty eight deaths from one disease usually don't even register on a developing nation's health stats, but if it's bird flu, standards shift. With 38 deaths, second to the 42 in Vietnam where stern measures have prevented any deaths at all this year, Indonesia's response has been disorganized and underfinanced, the World Bank says. The Times's Donald G. McNeil reports that conditions seem to be getting worse.
In Nature online Scottish researchers report rising hope for a way to reprogram adult cells back to their pluripotent stem-cell state. If successful, such things might be equivalent to embryonic stem cells but not run afoul of bans on morally-based bans on their use. The scientists, at the University of Edinburgh,...
In Nature online Scottish researchers report rising hope for a way to reprogram adult cells back to their pluripotent stem-cell state. If successful, such things might be equivalent to embryonic stem cells but not run afoul of bans on morally-based bans on their use. The scientists, at the University of Edinburgh, are fusing mouse embryonic stem cells with neurons to reprogram the brain cells into more primitive states. Most important, they say they are starting to understand how a cell reprograms itself via a few key genes, including one they call Nanog after a mythical Celtic land of eternally young fairies. But Carl T. Hall of the SF Chronicle reports wide opinion that to find a way to reprogram cells into an embryonic state will not happen quickly, and that use of true embryonic stem cells is likely to be a key to the research.
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Bounded by freeways and housing tracts, the Santa Monica Mountains in the Los Angeles Basin support five mountain lions, a number that surprises wildlife biologists. But, as one federal...
Bounded by freeways and housing tracts, the Santa Monica Mountains in the Los Angeles Basin support five mountain lions, a number that surprises wildlife biologists. But, as one federal ecologist told the Star's Zeke Barlow, they are acting just like pumas way out in the wilds: "not interacting with people, and they are killing deer." It's a pick because there is so much fascinating detail in this. In a long, colorful, and deeply reported account, Barlow describes the intimate profile that the scientists have put together of life for the big cats. It includes their territories, their fights to the death, their kinships, and their roamings from secluded canyons to suburban backyards.
Stretching 1400 miles long and about 100 miles wide, a big swath of the Pacific ocean along the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands is to become a marine sanctuary today by Presidential order. It marks an upgrade and enlargement of an...
Stretching 1400 miles long and about 100 miles wide, a big swath of the Pacific ocean along the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands is to become a marine sanctuary today by Presidential order. It marks an upgrade and enlargement of an existing coral reef ecosystem reserve and runs from rocky Nihoa near the main chain all the way out to Midway. The numbers are big: 140,000 square miles, 7,000 marine species in residence, and 14 million seabirds. It will be the nation's 14th marine sanctuary and will be even bigger than Australia's Great Barrier Reef, bigger than all the US's national parks combined. The White House is not exactly full of tree-huggers, nor of monk seal-huggers. But, the 
LA Times's Kenneth R. Weiss (among others) reports, a screening there for Bush...
The Times's Amy Harmon takes on a big, rather loose topic and tries to tie it up neatly. Maybe this one just doesn't bundle. It nonetheless is a good read and an enterprising bit of journalism. She starts with a man who takes chances and figured it was just his ineffable personality. But maybe, he...
The Times's Amy Harmon takes on a big, rather loose topic and tries to tie it up neatly. Maybe this one just doesn't bundle. It nonetheless is a good read and an enterprising bit of journalism. She starts with a man who takes chances and figured it was just his ineffable personality. But maybe, he is learning, he just has a gene for daredeviltry. And so on with weight gain, drinking, serenity, and other traits. As Harmon writes, "there is nothing new about the idea that temperament and behavior are shaped by genetic endowment." There is enough new science to invoke, however, to land on the front page. The story is a little bit about new genetic discovery linking some personality facets to genes, a little bit about whether one can truly feel proud or guilty about aspects of one's nature that are not so much achievements as they are endowments, related issues of parental pride or shame in how offspring turned out, and a lot of other conversation-stokers for dinners...
It's a commonplace that if the sky is clear at night, the temperature drops a lot faster. Now, in Nature, British researchers have run the numbers on the impact from jet contrails (often mislabeled as vapor trails) in slowing overnight heat's escape into space. They conclude that condensed ice from the exhausts of...
It's a commonplace that if the sky is clear at night, the temperature drops a lot faster. Now, in Nature, British researchers have run the numbers on the impact from jet contrails (often mislabeled as vapor trails) in slowing overnight heat's escape into space. They conclude that condensed ice from the exhausts of high-flying aircraft heat after dark provides an outsized share of aviation's contribution to global warming. The LA Times's Robert Lee Hotz vividly compares the spreading clouds to big mirrors in the sky. The team, from Leeds and Reading universities, figures that as much as 80 percent of airplane contrail climate mischief occurs during night flights (a term that compels The Tracker to think of the wonderful book by Antoine de Saint Exupery). Reducing red-eye flights, the researchers say, would be a big help. The Brits are all over the story, although usually with brief accounts.
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In the last year or so systematists -- the people who categorize biology's species and genuses, families and kingdoms, etc -- have been buzzing about the discovery in a Southeast Asian country market of dead animals from a family of...
In the last year or so systematists -- the people who categorize biology's species and genuses, families and kingdoms, etc -- have been buzzing about the discovery in a Southeast Asian country market of dead animals from a family of creatures that had been known only from fossils. They'd been filed away as extinct. Lots of people in Laos knew they weren't, and call the furry little things kha-nyou. Laotian rock rat is their uncute, international monicker. They are actually more like squirrels than rats. Now, a Florida State University professor emeritus has come back from Laos with a video of a live one. Local trappers caught it for him and a Thai scientist. They used sticky rice as bait, reports the Pitt. Post-Gazette's Anita Srikameswaran in a thorough account. It was docile, and waddles a bit like a duck. After filming, they let it go. The AP's no-byline story is getting picked up...
For many years populations of imported, Old World, Axis and Fallow deer have multiplied along the coastal side of Northern California's Marin Country. Wildlife managers for the Golden Gate...
For many years populations of imported, Old World, Axis and Fallow deer have multiplied along the coastal side of Northern California's Marin Country. Wildlife managers for the Golden Gate National Seashore say they are now outcompeting and may eventually displace entirely the local blacktail deer natives. They could expand deeper into the county, too. Not only that, the scientists say the exotic deer don't fill the same ecological niche. The park wants them gone. Its plan is to shoot a bunch of them, and also to try an experimental contraceptive. As the Bee's M. S. Enkoji writes, many locals like the animals and are fighting any plan to kill them off with gunfire.
The Monitor's Robert C. Cowen, in this week's edition of his "occasional column" of scientific gleanings and curiosities, reports that a much-scoffed-at notion that hot water put into the freezer ices over sooner than cold water has some validity. His account has to do with a Tanzanian schoolboy's...
The Monitor's Robert C. Cowen, in this week's edition of his "occasional column" of scientific gleanings and curiosities, reports that a much-scoffed-at notion that hot water put into the freezer ices over sooner than cold water has some validity. His account has to do with a Tanzanian schoolboy's observations, minerals, and other bits -- some of them picked up, as Cowen acknowledges, from New Scientist.
See also: New Scientist 6/3 Marcus Chown (subscription req'd for complete article)
The Tracker generally demurs on purely clinical medical stories (just too many of them, ditto for malpractice suits and healthcare availability yarns), but this one jumps out. What with so...
The Tracker generally demurs on purely clinical medical stories (just too many of them, ditto for malpractice suits and healthcare availability yarns), but this one jumps out. What with so many of us boomers thinking we can jog damned near all the way to our caskets, worn-out joints are big business. AP's Cheryl Wittenauer tells of the first person in the US to get the Birmingham hip resurfacing system, which is already popular overseas and esp. in the UK where its inventors live. The FDA recently gave it the green light. If your bones are basically solid, it says here, it offers an alternative to sawing off the whole end of the femur and putting a metal and plastic or whatever ball and stem on there. The doc just jams a new top over the old one. Seems sort of like getting a retread rather than a whole new tire. A rug instead of new...
Doctors desperate to find a way to combat anorexia nervosa often prescribe antidepressants in a hope to ease its victims' compulsion to lose weight, sometimes to the point of death. But in this week's JAMA leaders of a study on 93 women, about half on Prozac and about half on placebo, say they found no substantial...
Doctors desperate to find a way to combat anorexia nervosa often prescribe antidepressants in a hope to ease its victims' compulsion to lose weight, sometimes to the point of death. But in this week's JAMA leaders of a study on 93 women, about half on Prozac and about half on placebo, say they found no substantial difference in their ensuing weight losses or gains. The results, said one disappointed specialist, are further evidence that anorexia is among the most "treatment-resistant" of mental illnesses. The study suggests that other anti-depressants are unlikely to work either. The NYTimes's Benedict Carey reports that anorexia is more often fatal than any other mental disorder. LA Times's Denise Gellene writes that the results send anorexia therapists "back to square one". Jamie Talan at Newsday finds a similar glum quote: "It's back to the drawing board," and a surmise that the disease acts like an addiction but, the doc asks plaintively, "an...
This reads like a comedy of errors except it has no laughs. The High Country News's Allison Gerfin reports that efforts to reintroduce Mexican wolves to the Southwest hit a giant...
This reads like a comedy of errors except it has no laughs. The High Country News's Allison Gerfin reports that efforts to reintroduce Mexican wolves to the Southwest hit a giant pothole recently when US Fish and Wildlife Service workers tried to relocate a wolfpack. Its members were going after cattle belonging to the White Mountain Apache Tribe. The resulting sequence of mishaps left all but two of the pack's dozen wolves dead.
Astronomers using a European X-ray telescope have spotted, in a large cluster of galaxies 800 million light years away, a gigantic blob of superhot plasma racing along at nearly 2 million miles per hour. It seems...
Astronomers using a European X-ray telescope have spotted, in a large cluster of galaxies 800 million light years away, a gigantic blob of superhot plasma racing along at nearly 2 million miles per hour. It seems to be held together with the help of gravity from that mysterious stuff, dark matter. In images given vivid computerized colorization during translation from their native X-ray, it looks a little like a monster comet. The ball of fire, USA Today's Dan Vergano reports in a rockabilly riff, is enough to "shake your nerves and rattle your brain."
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USA Today Dan Vergano; Space.com Ker Than...
Like generals who prepare to fight the last war all over again, journalists and assignment editors fresh off a big story too-often see its echo in every little thing that comes along. That's human nature. And...
Like generals who prepare to fight the last war all over again, journalists and assignment editors fresh off a big story too-often see its echo in every little thing that comes along. That's human nature. And Hurricane Katrina is what made little Alberto a big story. As it blew through, the Tampa Tribune's Baird Helgeson wisely called up a few experts and asked, re Alberto, so what? The answer: not much, that's what. The story provides some valuable perspective.
A blight that has killed millions of ash trees across the midwest is spreading, with the insects that cause it now in Illinois. The vector, the emerald ash borer, is an Asian import. It's a bad one, writes...
A blight that has killed millions of ash trees across the midwest is spreading, with the insects that cause it now in Illinois. The vector, the emerald ash borer, is an Asian import. It's a bad one, writes the Chic. Sun-Times's Gary Wisby. Illinois residents there are fighting off the Asian Long-Horned beetle but compared to the new pest, he says, "you ain't seen nothin' yet." Lee Bergquist of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel warns the buggers are on Wisconsin's doorstep. Some 30 percent of street trees in his state are ash. The outbreak started in Detroit in 2002, with 20 million dead trees in Michigan so far. Some experts say the scourge could rival Dutch elm disease. Scientists seem to have no remedy except to cut up infected trees and burn them.
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