The Cassini-Huygens team has a report in Nature distilling more of the radar images it got from the mother ship's flybys after the landing of their small lander on Saturn's moon Titan in January last year. They see, the SF...
The Cassini-Huygens team has a report in Nature distilling more of the radar images it got from the mother ship's flybys after the landing of their small lander on Saturn's moon Titan in January last year. They see, the SF Chronicle's David Perlman reports, "drainage channels that look for all the world like the Amazon" plus , ice volcanoes, lakes, and a few craters. But mostly it remains no Earth, its temperatures far below where liquid water can persist, and clouds and puddles of organic goo.
Stories:
SF Chronicle David Perlman; New Scientist Space...
It appears that ugly sheep -- lambs, specifically, which sheep keepers usually cull -- may carry genes that breeders might use to improve wool quality or quantity. Both AP...
It appears that ugly sheep -- lambs, specifically, which sheep keepers usually cull -- may carry genes that breeders might use to improve wool quality or quantity. Both AP and UP picked it up from a University of Adelaide press release. A researcher there wants to know when a homely lamb, especially one with messed-up wool, appears and that it be kept alive for him. The Tracker finds this intriguing, and also intriguing that that there is no sign of a nibble on another release at the university's site -- about discovery of a new species of flying possum. If Walt Kelly had only known. And this is also an excuse to run a pic of a flying possum. None of an ugly sheep could be found. But that thing to the upper right would make one woeful Ovis.
Stories:...
8Jun 2006
The only FDA-approved fully artificial heart, a double-pump machine pneumatically driven by an outside power source and made by the Syn-Cardia company, got some local news today and yesterday. The Columbus...
The only FDA-approved fully artificial heart, a double-pump machine pneumatically driven by an outside power source and made by the Syn-Cardia company, got some local news today and yesterday. The Columbus Dispatch's Misti Crane wrote on a man who got one, at Ohio State University's Medical Center, to keep him going while awaiting a heart transplant. And the Richmond Times-Dispatch's Tammie Smith reports on a similar case at Virginia Commonwealth University. It's unclear whether that is coincidence but press releases were flying.
Stories:
Columbus Dispatch Misti Crane; Richmond T-Dispatch...
The Monitor's Peter N. Spotts asks a few accomplished climatologists for their opinion of the new documentary on Al Gore's climate crusade. They seem to think it's fine, but they have quibbles. After reading Spotts's...
The Monitor's Peter N. Spotts asks a few accomplished climatologists for their opinion of the new documentary on Al Gore's climate crusade. They seem to think it's fine, but they have quibbles. After reading Spotts's account The Tracker guesses that, were the profs grading undergraduate essays, this one might get a C+ for accuracy. By movie standards, that's an A+. Gore, it says here, overdoes it a bit on prospects for sea level rise this century, and Mt. Kilimanjaro's shrinking ice cover may not be the best example of very-real loss of glaciers worldwide from warmer weather. He should have mentioned the profound perils to marine life of an acidifying ocean. But its general message and explanations, they say, pass muster.
Other Spotts News: The Monitor...
The feds and especially President Bush outlaw as immoral any human embryonic stem cell cloning on the national tax dollar and South Korea's Hwang Woo Suk made a fraudulent hash...
The feds and especially President Bush outlaw as immoral any human embryonic stem cell cloning on the national tax dollar and South Korea's Hwang Woo Suk made a fraudulent hash of his once-lionized efforts, but the promise for relieving human suffering is an irresistable lure. Harvard yesterday detailed its decision to forge ahead to clone embryonic stem cells with private money. It has several other US research labs as partners. The press conference unleashed a flood of news reports. Most of them provide roundups on other efforts in the US or elsewhere. One is in California where UCSF is hard at work and voters have approved a big stem cell research institute.
Stories:
AP Malcolm...
Black women get less breast cancer overall than do white women in the US, but mortality rates are higher. A University of North Carolina study in JAMA reports that when it does occur in black women, especially before menopause, it is more likely to be a particularly aggressive cell type. The report is getting wide...
Black women get less breast cancer overall than do white women in the US, but mortality rates are higher. A University of North Carolina study in JAMA reports that when it does occur in black women, especially before menopause, it is more likely to be a particularly aggressive cell type. The report is getting wide pickup in the press. Various versions also suggest that while tumor type is important, other factors such as lower rates of screening and delayed treatment may also explain part of the variation in survival among women of differing ancestries.
Stories:
N.C. News&Observer Catherine Clabby; AP Carla K. Johnson; NYTimes...
This admittedly overly long post is in part an excuse to pass on some pleasing English place names on a slow day. Also, to share how some reporters and some papers just have a different...
This admittedly overly long post is in part an excuse to pass on some pleasing English place names on a slow day. Also, to share how some reporters and some papers just have a different way of portraying the news and its underlying causes. The UK is full of examples. This news essay comes from The Observer's science editor Robin McKie and staff writer Felix Lowe. They discuss the historic and charming Dawlish railroad line to Devon and Cornwall, aka God's Wonderful Railway. It wends so closely along wave-wracked seaside cliffs that its trains sometimes finish with seaweed on their carriages. The waves are growing higher, the cliffs are crumbling, and thus what else to finger but rising sea level, worsening storminess, and global warming's general threat to the existence of the line's route along some of south Devon's...
The AP's Elliot Minor reports from Albany, Ga, that the Fish and Wildlife Service has a lawsuit in its face that it does not want to fight in court. So, it is declaring 1,200 miles of rivers...
The AP's Elliot Minor reports from Albany, Ga, that the Fish and Wildlife Service has a lawsuit in its face that it does not want to fight in court. So, it is declaring 1,200 miles of rivers and streams in the South as critical habitat for several freshwater mussel species. Minor shares the kick he gets from some of the drab molluscs' colorful names including shinyrayed pocketbook and oval pigtoe. Plus, he gets a quote that is an exquisite kicker, unfortunately not from a scientist but from an enviro lawyer. It's still a good line about mussels as indicators of a river's health: "Hey, if a mussel can't live in that area it probably isn't good for people drinking....if they're dying, your own kidneys are next."
NASA released details Monday on which of its many centers will be doing what to fulfill the goals of the Constellation Project, the official name for the program ordered by the Bush Administration...
NASA released details Monday on which of its many centers will be doing what to fulfill the goals of the Constellation Project, the official name for the program ordered by the Bush Administration to get astronauts back on the moon and on to Mars. The engineering and technology project gained attention from many science writers. Many gave it a local angle. While several large dailies ignored the news, smaller papers focussed on the marching orders arriving at their local space agency research centers. The wide spread of effort not only keeps NASA's constellation of labs busy but, one is forced to remark, it also builds a bipartisan political constituency around the nation for the project's long life.
Sample Stories:
AP...
Older fellows used to joke that they may have snow on the roof but there's plenty of heat in the furnace. The kindling down there may not, however, be in such good shape. For just as pregnant, older women bear a somewhat...
Older fellows used to joke that they may have snow on the roof but there's plenty of heat in the furnace. The kindling down there may not, however, be in such good shape. For just as pregnant, older women bear a somewhat higher chance their offspring will suffer birth defects such as Down Syndrome, aging men lose some of their ability to produce healthy children due to sperm deterioration. The older they are, the greater the number of broken sections in their DNA. One consequence is a rising chance of dwarfism. Or so says a study from the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in the current PNAS. Best hed award goes to that over Emma Marris's byline in Nature online: "Senior sperm have dodgier DNA." The findings on about 100 men, recruited from the lab's workforce and roster of retirees, come as (in the US at least) men and women alike are...
An odd exchange over a maybe-muzzled professor is playing out in the Times-Picayune letter's column. In May ksjtracker posted an interview by its book editor with the LSU prof, Ivor van Heerden, author of a post-Katrina book and head of the school's hurricane center. In it he said the university has at times...
An odd exchange over a maybe-muzzled professor is playing out in the Times-Picayune letter's column. In May ksjtracker posted an interview by its book editor with the LSU prof, Ivor van Heerden, author of a post-Katrina book and head of the school's hurricane center. In it he said the university has at times interfered with his conversations with reporters. What is curious is the response by the university's vice chancellor of university relations in a letter to the editor. It says LSU is devoted to free speech, but wants its faculty never to discuss things with the press in fields outside their formal training. And it says civil engineering (as in levees) falls outside a geologist and hurricane expert's scope. Huh? Sounds like freedom to talk as long as it is about what one is told to talk about.
Items:
LSU Letter to Editor here...
Cownose Ray sounds like a weird guy you may have known in sixth grade, but it's actually a prolific species of sting ray that is feasting upon oysters in Chesapeake...
Cownose Ray sounds like a weird guy you may have known in sixth grade, but it's actually a prolific species of sting ray that is feasting upon oysters in Chesapeake Bay. They are bad news for an already-teetering industry. The Hampton Roads Daily Item's Fred Carroll fills us in on a solution proposed at a meeting of scientists, regulators, and commercial interests: ray filets. And steaks, soup, or whatever else one could cook up to make the creatures into cuisine. One pack of 5 million rays, Carroll reports, covered more than 1,100 acres. Such mobs eat a lot of oysters in a twinkling. But that also sounds like a creature that could be netted at no taxpayer cost in huge numbers if only there were a market.
This is just a chance for The Tracker to pass on a cultural tip. The news peg is a good column today in the Post by Abigail Trafford, who gapes in disbelief at the recent news that Brits appear healthier than Yanks. She asks "How could this be? The British diet is terrible -- greasy fish and chips...
This is just a chance for The Tracker to pass on a cultural tip. The news peg is a good column today in the Post by Abigail Trafford, who gapes in disbelief at the recent news that Brits appear healthier than Yanks. She asks "How could this be? The British diet is terrible -- greasy fish and chips, globs of shepherd's pie (mashed potatoes piled on gray, ground-up meat), Yorkshire pudding (cream, eggs, flour and fat drippings). Forget vitamin D: The English rarely see the sun in a dank climate where the national dress is a raincoat. No wonder they drink more than we do!" ..... Well!! The Tracker just heard personally, from a Cambridge professor who seemed quite perceptive, that such characterizations are vile canards circulated by tourists (except perhaps for the booze and raincoat parts). He says English home cooking was always just fine, even excellent. It's the English restaurants that are terrible. So there.
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Columbus Ohio is a long way from any tide pool, so the Dispatch's Mike Lafferty feels compelled to explain to his readers just what a sea anemone is. In the ensuing, sizeable story...
Columbus Ohio is a long way from any tide pool, so the Dispatch's Mike Lafferty feels compelled to explain to his readers just what a sea anemone is. In the ensuing, sizeable story he starts on an Ohio State researcher's fascination with them and works his way through not only their biology, but through an NSF-sponsored effort to map genetic links among all living creatures. The Tracker finds it a gratifying instance, in a regional paper, of well-illustrated reporting on fundamental research.
Grist for the Mill: OSU did provide...
Many writers have chronicled the worldwide decline of amphibians in the last few decades, but few stories have the gripping immediacy of this one from Brenda Goodman, writing in the Times....
Many writers have chronicled the worldwide decline of amphibians in the last few decades, but few stories have the gripping immediacy of this one from Brenda Goodman, writing in the Times. It has to do with suitcases, a lethal fungus, a race against time, and funny looking, rare frogs.
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