A Russian and two US scientists report in Science magazine that permafrost soils in Siberia hold as much as 30 times as much carbon as non-permafrost...
A Russian and two US scientists report in Science magazine that permafrost soils in Siberia hold as much as 30 times as much carbon as non-permafrost soils. As climate warming thaws them and other arctic soils, they fear, billions of tons of their stored carbon will rise as CO2, methane, and other gases. A University of Florida prof tells the LA Times's Janet Wilson the soil is so full of organic material that warming it is "like taking food out of your freezer....leave it on your counter for a few days, and it rots." The result will be a further, positive feedback loop intensifying the CO2 greenhouse effect from human combustion of fossil fuels.
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It's hard for residents of developed nations to imagine a city of 4.5 million people with almost no sewage treatment and hardly even any drains except in the homes of the wealthy. But that's Luanda, capital of Angola in southwest Africa. Drinking water is from the Bengo river, a muddy course of garbage and trash....
It's hard for residents of developed nations to imagine a city of 4.5 million people with almost no sewage treatment and hardly even any drains except in the homes of the wealthy. But that's Luanda, capital of Angola in southwest Africa. Drinking water is from the Bengo river, a muddy course of garbage and trash. Cholera is spreading through the broad slums where children play in filth, killing 1,600 people since February. The Times's Sharon LaFraniere takes readers there for a look at how this struggling but corrupt nation, despite hefty oil income, has little sign of the sort of public health infrastructure that most industrial nations have had for more than a century. An experienced aid doctor told LaFraniere he never had seen a city with such bad conditions on such a wide scale.
Scientists are amazed at a two-year-old, and dead, Beluga whale found up an Alaskan river nearly 1000 miles from the sea. First up with the story, it appears, is Kris Capps of the Fairbanks News-...
Scientists are amazed at a two-year-old, and dead, Beluga whale found up an Alaskan river nearly 1000 miles from the sea. First up with the story, it appears, is Kris Capps of the Fairbanks News-Miner. AP's Dan Joling filed on it too. The canoeists who found it at first joked among themselves that they'd found a prehistoric salmon, or maybe a big dead seal. A closer look suggested beluga. Experts were called and confirmed it. No beluga or other whale has ever been found so far up river before, they said, although belugas are known to venture fairly far up rivers chasing salmon. The surmise is that this one too was trailing a meal up the Tanana River until it got trapped in winter ice near Fairbanks. The body was rank, so it had been there for awhile.
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Fairbanks News-Miner...
A great deal of media interest has followed the case of two 10-month-old girls joined from the breastbone to the hip and their surgery at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles to separate them. The NYTimes's...
A great deal of media interest has followed the case of two 10-month-old girls joined from the breastbone to the hip and their surgery at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles to separate them. The NYTimes's Maria Newman and the LA Times's Juliet Chung today provide two particularly good medical accounts of the task that faced the surgical team, how it went, and the girls' conditions. Hope is now rising that the girls, born in LA to a (legally) visiting Mexican couple, and who benefited from months of preparation by the surgical team, will recover and live lives close to normal.
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NY Times Maria Newman; LA Times...
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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SF Chronicle...
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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LA Times...
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...
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