Arctic Sea Ice hit the news two ways this week. One was simple enough - the winter refreeze of the Arctic moved fast, as expected. After all last year's summer melt-off was the largest ever, so the remnant ice pack had a long way to go to rebuild itself, if only thinly, during the dark winter. At its...
Arctic Sea Ice hit the news two ways this week. One was simple enough - the winter refreeze of the Arctic moved fast, as expected. After all last year's summer melt-off was the largest ever, so the remnant ice pack had a long way to go to rebuild itself, if only thinly, during the dark winter. At its peak, which we just past, it was the 6th lowest in the instrumented record. The second is not so simple. A slew of news outlets wrote up the causative link between loss of Arctic ice and the outbreak of bitter winter and spring weather - cold and snowy - in parts of the world at more temperate latitudes including the US and Europe. One might instinctively think that a less-cold Arctic would also mean less cold and snow to the south as well.
I've read a lot of the stories on this second topic and none do a particularly good job leading readers to see a natural way for a warming world to include a rapidly warming Arctic that in turn would make the rest...
Last week, an announcement went around about a new paper showing that women decline science/math jobs because we have more options. Right away I was eager to see how the press would cover it. As we learned from the Larry Summers incident a few years ago, discussing gender imbalances in certain technical professions...
Last week, an announcement went around about a new paper showing that women decline science/math jobs because we have more options. Right away I was eager to see how the press would cover it. As we learned from the Larry Summers incident a few years ago, discussing gender imbalances in certain technical professions can be politically explosive.
And the topic is close to home for me and probably many other readers of this site who turned away from STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) careers in favor of journalism.
The study, published in Psychological Science, involved nearly 1500 college bound seniors who were first surveyed in high school and later at the age of 33. The researchers reportedly looked at SAT scores and surveyed their subjects about beliefs, values and occupations.
The conclusion: People of both sexes who...
This morning, running through energy news stories at a popular aggregator site (Zite Magazine) this dramatic headline greeted the eye: Coal power likely culprit behind thousands of deaths in Alberta: Study. Thousands! That's a lot. Click on it, one goes straight to the media source:
- ...
This morning, running through energy news stories at a popular aggregator site (Zite Magazine) this dramatic headline greeted the eye: Coal power likely culprit behind thousands of deaths in Alberta: Study. Thousands! That's a lot. Click on it, one goes straight to the media source:
- Globe and Mail - Josh Wingrove: Use of coal power costs $300-million a year in health expenses: report ; The meat of the report, reports Wingrove: "Coal pollution also leads to 100 premature deaths, 700 emergency room visits and 80 hospital admissions each years, as well as trigggering asthma attacks. It also emits other contaminants, such as mercury, said the study."
The derived hed in the version that first caught the tracker's attention, with its thousands of deaths, may be...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) Today we comment on an extensive and well-documented story published in the Weekend supplement of “La Tercera” (Chile), about a family who decided to stop the chemotherapy treatment of their 2-year-old son affected with leukemia. Parents argued they didn’t...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) Today we comment on an extensive and well-documented story published in the Weekend supplement of “La Tercera” (Chile), about a family who decided to stop the chemotherapy treatment of their 2-year-old son affected with leukemia. Parents argued they didn’t want his son to suffer anymore, and that there were other “natural” alternatives. Medical doctors were against this decision, and the hospital tried to legally oblige the parents to continue with the treatment. A court refused the allegations of the hospital. Six months after stopping chemotherapy the infant is healthy and the parents proud of their decision. The story describes the medical aspects in depth, it is very well balanced, and it explains that the doctors consider the decision irresponsible and alert that the infant's future is uncertain. The narrative is excellent, but overall, the story seems to incite parents in similar situations to take the...
A handful of pieces that ran last week describing the first proof of “reverse evolution” were so confusing and odd that I had to send them to some biologists I know for a reality check.
What I found weird was that the pieces described the loss of a previously adaptive trait as some sort of...
A handful of pieces that ran last week describing the first proof of “reverse evolution” were so confusing and odd that I had to send them to some biologists I know for a reality check.
What I found weird was that the pieces described the loss of a previously adaptive trait as some sort of shocker. In this latest case, scientists from the University of Michigan found that dust mites had gone from being parasitic to free-living, the change allegedly being surprising because the parasitic mites were thought to have evolved from a free-living ancestor.
The loss of a trait didn’t seems surprising to me, but maybe it was to biologists. It wasn't to the ones I consulted.
Scientists have understood since Darwin that evolution is not an ascent up a ladder – it’s a process of adaptation to local environments (and some random drift.) The notion of “devolution” doesn’t make much sense in light of our...
NBC science correspondent Robert Bazell is leaving the network after 38 years, TVNewser reports.
In an email to the staff, he wrote,...
NBC science correspondent Robert Bazell is leaving the network after 38 years, TVNewser reports.
In an email to the staff, he wrote, "The best thing about television journalism is that you never do it alone. Everything is a cooperative effort. To all of you who have shared your wisdom, your talent, your hard work, all the good times and adventures and above all your friendship, I cannot begin to express enough gratitude."
Bazell will be joining Yale University as an adjunct professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology.
I have run into Bazell often, at scientific meetings and elsewhere, and I know him to be a smart and hard-working reporter. Television isn't always kind to science stories that require intelligent and sometimes lengthy...
Michael Calderone at The Huffington Post is reporting that Lenny Bernstein, a sports editor at The Washington Post, has...
Michael Calderone at The Huffington Post is reporting that Lenny Bernstein, a sports editor at The Washington Post, has been assigned to the environment beat at the paper.
The Columbia Journalism Review and others raised concern earlier this month when Bernstein's predecessor on the beat, Juliet Eilperin, was reassigned to the White House. The move was particularly disturbing because it came just after The New York Times had canceled its Green blog, a signal to many that the Times would devote fewer resources to environmental coverage. (Times officials said that was not the case, and that...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) Argentinean government presented the plan "Argentina Innovadora 2020" aimed to duplicate the number of scientists in the country and triplicate the R&D public funding in the next 7 years. During the presentation of the plan,...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) Argentinean government presented the plan "Argentina Innovadora 2020" aimed to duplicate the number of scientists in the country and triplicate the R&D public funding in the next 7 years. During the presentation of the plan, Argentinean president Cristina Fernández said that diabetes is a disease of rich people that eat a lot and are sedentary, that Argentinean scientists working abroad want to return to Argentina but they can’t because of their mortgages, that Argentina has good human resources because they eat lots of protein, and several other surreal assessments. Nonetheless the plan seems to be really solid, ambitious, and it can make a big impact in Argentinean R&D system. It was brilliantly exposed by the minister for Science and Technology. At this moment science reporters have only explained its basic details and goals, but they will soon have to analyze the plan more...
Word is that astronomers have just gotten the best, blotchy, and not particularly attractive map of the sky ever made. Now they can calculate more accurately than ever how old the universe most likely is (about 13.82 billion years instead of the previously estimated 13.73 billion years - which...
Word is that astronomers have just gotten the best, blotchy, and not particularly attractive map of the sky ever made. Now they can calculate more accurately than ever how old the universe most likely is (about 13.82 billion years instead of the previously estimated 13.73 billion years - which doesn't sound like much unless you write the difference out: ~100,000,000 years). They also can guess better what the ingredients for making the likes of us were that the Big Bang spat forth at this further but more precise time zero and other fabulous things that help us to know our place in big history.
In other words, something fairly important has happened in cosmology. A big press conference in Europe and dozens of papers submitted to the Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics spill the beans. But it's not as though mankind just made contact with aliens, So festive as this makes many scientists the space to describe it in general media...
21Mar 2013
Yesterday, I wrote a post in praise of a collaboration between PBS News Hour and the Center for Public Integrity which took a twenty-years-after look at story of Erin Brockovich. As you may recall, Brockovich was the crusading law clerk (made...
Yesterday, I wrote a post in praise of a collaboration between PBS News Hour and the Center for Public Integrity which took a twenty-years-after look at story of Erin Brockovich. As you may recall, Brockovich was the crusading law clerk (made famous in a movie starring Julia Roberts) whose work led to multimillion settlement from the California utility company, PG&E, to a residents of a small town in California.
That settlement was based on years of chemical dumping that led to hexavalent chromium contamination of the ground water in that area - and years of a company coverup. As these latest stories pointed out, the ground water is still contaminated (although PG&E is working on a clean up plan) and the town of Hinkley is now pretty a ghost town. The part of the reporting that I found most fascinating was the evidence of the way the company manipulated the state regulatory system following the...
A new report on the state of American journalism found "a continued erosion of news reporting resources," and " a news industry that is more undermanned and unprepared to uncover stories, dig deep into emerging ones or to question information put into...
A new report on the state of American journalism found "a continued erosion of news reporting resources," and " a news industry that is more undermanned and unprepared to uncover stories, dig deep into emerging ones or to question information put into its hands."
Those were among the many disturbing conclusions from the latest annual report on American journalism by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. The report was released earlier this week.
I wasn't inclined to make too much of the report, because it seemed a bit irrelevant to the news industry that I write about. In my opinion, there has never been as much science writing, or as much good science writing, as there is now. And I think that's true of the media generally, not just science journalism. I haven't been this excited about the news business since I was trying to claw my way...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) ESA scientists working with the Plank Telescope have presented the most detailed map ever made of the oldest light in the Universe, only 380.000 years after the Big Bang. The data reveal that the Universe is 80 million years older than previously thought, that there’s...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) ESA scientists working with the Plank Telescope have presented the most detailed map ever made of the oldest light in the Universe, only 380.000 years after the Big Bang. The data reveal that the Universe is 80 million years older than previously thought, that there’s a bit more dark matter and a bit less dark energy than it was assumed, and that the current cosmological models are remarkably accurate. We’ve read many stories about it in the Spanish speaking press, but for the moment none that deserves to be highlighted. Much more interesting is the long and very detailed story published in El Mundo about the disappointing results of one of the trials of the Glaxo’s malaria vaccine. The protection in kids dropped to 17% after 4 years of inoculation. The results of a more important phase III trial will be presented end of 2013, but all sources used by the reporter agree that the current data published in the NEJM is...
Any newspaper can do something that really ticks off anybody who has a set of hackles to raise. A Brooklyn-based blogger, press critic, and climate change news specialist has a tidy tantrum out today aimed at two newspapers at near-opposite ends of the spectrum of old-time UK media. His ire has merit and...
Any newspaper can do something that really ticks off anybody who has a set of hackles to raise. A Brooklyn-based blogger, press critic, and climate change news specialist has a tidy tantrum out today aimed at two newspapers at near-opposite ends of the spectrum of old-time UK media. His ire has merit and deserves a wide audience:
- Discover / Collide-a-scape blog - Keith Kloor: When newspapers con the public ;
There's not much to add from this end, as it'd just be to say huzzah and go get'em Keith. His targets are an example of "crazy-ass reporting on climate change" at the Daily Mail...
An apparently despondent Julie Rovner of NPR posted the following on Facebook this afternoon:
The ...
An apparently despondent Julie Rovner of NPR posted the following on Facebook this afternoon:
The story she links to, which she wrote for NPR's shots blog, explains her despair.
Despite her efforts and those by a lot of others, the public, she wrote, "actually knows less about the law now than when it passed in 2010. Oh, and a lot of what people think they know just isn't so." Tough medicine for her and for the others who've been covering Obamacare.
I'm afraid we can't provide much help for Rovner here; we're not entirely sure what the law will do either. Perhaps she can take some comfort...
One's pet peeves can be so boring in the ears of others. Undaunted, onward I trudge...
The American Geophysical Union's press office this morning sent out two press releases with email alerts. The first email hit my inbox at 8:04 a.m. Pacific:
- AGU: Cosmic Rays Indicate...
One's pet peeves can be so boring in the ears of others. Undaunted, onward I trudge...
The American Geophysical Union's press office this morning sent out two press releases with email alerts. The first email hit my inbox at 8:04 a.m. Pacific:
- AGU: Cosmic Rays Indicate Voyager 1 Has Left the Solar System
Followed at 1o:27 by this version (its link goes to the press release behind the email):
I went nuts at the first one. However, I went off half-cocked too. As nearly all space writers know, astronomy press releases commonly have two delivery routes. One is directly from the host institution if one is on its contact list, and the second is via the American Astronomical Society's p.r.-forwarding service. Its pio Rick...
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