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SF Chronicle, Register, etc: New findings on how stem cells get their chemical “go” signals

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:07:57 -0400

Stem cells, human or embryonic, presumably need a green light of some kind to start proliferating and differentiating into useful, living tissue. In Nature’s online advance yesterday, researchers at UC Berkeley reported discovery of chemical pa
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Wash. Post: New push for additional federal wilderness protection

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:40:49 -0400

For a variety of reasons including shifts toward Democratic dominance and rising bi-partisan as well as local support, Congress is setting aside more land as wilderness, reports the Post’s Juliet Eilperin. She also notes the contrast of more pr
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Washington Post: How a tower crane works, why it’s sometimes dangerous, why it’s usually not.

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 14:40:50 -0400

Recent headlines about construction cranes toppling in New York and elsewhere brings a sensible, straightforward explanation of their history, how they work, and why proper handling ought to have prevented such accidents. The argument may be a little
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AP etc: A slug of gulf moisture, some northern chill, a big late snowpack and next thing you know Iowa is under water

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:18:19 -0400

At least it’s not global warming - not with any conviction any way. The overwhelming flooding in parts of the midwest has to have plenty of news and assignment editors yelping for the science desk to explain why it’s so freakin’ wet
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Wires, Science News, etc: A trio of Super Earths spotted by Euro team

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:39:38 -0400

Wires and a few other outlets are lighting up this morning with word from a meeting on “super Earths” (masses less than 25 Earths) in Nantes, France about a big fresh haul of extrasolar planets. They include, notably, one set of three orb
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LA Times: More Pacific coast salmon woes. In Alaska’s warming rivers the chinook are getting “ick.”

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:48:23 -0400

Up on Alaska’s northernmost, tundra-speckled coast the locals already have complained in recent years that global warming has made it harder to keep meat fresh in their cellars - as permafrost thaws, the ground doesn’t provide a natural f
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AP: Wire service says it overstated toxicity of that sewage sludge spread on Baltimore house yards

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 15:22:59 -0400

In April an AP story set off a tempest in Baltimore, one buffeted by suggestions of environmental racism, in its account of a study of lead in the environment and a possible way to get rid of it. Johns Hopkins University Medical Center researchers so
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Five Grinnell College Graduates Awarded NSF GRFP

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 15:12:41 -0400

Five Grinnell College Graduates Awarded NSF GRFP The five Grinnell graduates named NSF Fellows include: * Adam Booth ‘04, with a major in physics, is pursuing graduate study in geology at the University of Oregon. * Natalie Funk ‘
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Nature Network Toronto pub night

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 02:28:23 -0400

The Toronto hub now has about 20 people (more than before!) and a group (thanks to Jen!) and will soon have its first pub night. Drop by at the Duke of York this Wednesday at 8:00 PM if you’re interested. (And if you come earlier, you can also
Source: easternblot.net

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Wired Magazine’s Incoherent Truths

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 02:03:26 -0400

Many of our tech-savvy friends — the kind of folks who nurse along the beowulf clusters our climate models run on — are scratching their heads over some cheeky shrieking that recently appeared in a WIRED magazine article on Rethinking Wha
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Hologram

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 14:26:47 -0400

This is a hologram of a dancing girl, for a movie poster, shown at Subtle Technologies. She really moves! There was also an opportunity to visit the hologram workshop and see how holograms are made, but I didn’t have time for that.
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AP: A contest to catch giant sharks for fun and prizes; Reuters etc: Sharks about gone from Med

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 19:13:12 -0400

Two bits of shark news today provide a contrast that doesn’t need elaboration. AP Frank Eltman filed from Garden City, NY, on the protests swirling around a shark fishing tournament. This one has $1 million in prizes. The story notes that anima
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Wash. Post: Uh oh. That Chinese earthquake ran through faults that look just like the ones next door…

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:42:49 -0400

In Wednesday’s Post Joel Achenbach introduces readers to a geophysicist in Pasadena who frets that China’s dreadful earthquake seems to have arisen from a cascade of fractures on adjacent faults on the Sichuan massif. And those faults see
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Wall St. Journal - From Walden Pond to Global Warming, a flower-strewn path

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:01:36 -0400

The Journal’s Robert Lee Hotz’s column this week takes readers for a woodland walk, addressing global warming writ small and with a deeply literary angle. Henry David Thoreau kept meticulous natural history records at Walden Pond, he remi
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Lots of ink, old story: Palm from 2000-year-old seed in Israel still growing, news to some.

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:07:09 -0400

In 2005 news first circulated of a palm tree in Israel growing from a seed recovered at Masada, the old Roman fortress taken over by Sicarii Jewish rebels and retaken by Romans in one of the bloodiest, best-known sieges in ancient warfare. The seed w
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Reuters, some others: Yet another supernova goes off in public, media don’t make the connection.

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 16:04:14 -0400

One role of mass media is to keep track of like events and remind readers when more come along. Journalism should promote society’s short-term, collective memory. Three weeks ago a flood of news stories (see post, May 22) described astronomers
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AP, etc: Feds warn some to avoid amalgam dental fillings. It’s the mercury.

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 14:48:42 -0400

A consumer group called the Mercury Policy Project won - in alliance with other organizations - a victory via lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA has issued a precautionary warning to pregnant women and to parents of young child
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Science bloggers

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 02:26:46 -0400

Alex Palazzo of The Daily Transcript was in town for a job interview and he met some local science bloggers (me, Philip, and John) while he was here. Alex told us all about the traffic in Cambridge… …about the diminishing Nature Network
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San Diego Union-Trib: Science writer finds an angle in the local US Open

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 18:50:05 -0400

Golf courses are easy targets for enviro bricbats. All that lawn, all those sprinklers in a season of drought, pesticides and herbicides to keep the green’s turf-only, etc. But consider this: only 30 percent of the typical course’s acrea
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Lots of Ink: GLAST takes the high road

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 18:33:12 -0400

The Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope won’t be with us much longer. NASA’s looking for a new name (along the lines of Hubble, Compton, Spitzer, and other space telescopes). But the machine is in space, its detectors getting configured
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National Post: OK, Congress members. All those who believe in human-caused global warming, say aye…

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 17:47:54 -0400

Thanks to Seed Magazine’s Daily Zeitgeist, and thence referred to Matt Nisbet’s Framing Science blog, thank y’all very much, we learn of a poll of Congress on science issues that the National Journal magazine published. It seems tha
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Lots of Ink: Pluto’s taxonomic fandango, take 2. Now it’s king of the plutoids.

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:57:59 -0400

Astronomers have their asteroids, their meteoroids, their droids (no, wait, that’s science fiction). And now: plutoids. Such a (not) graceful term. The erstwhile planet Pluto, made amid great debate into a minor or dwarf planet that meant not a
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AIP Inside Science News Service: A scientist to writer to novelist story

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:07:07 -0400

This is a bit off the beaten track. Over at the American Institute of Physics, news editor and former newspaperman Jim Dawson has put on the AIPs news site a diverting profile and Q&A of Alan Lightman. Once a hardcore, practicing astrophysicist a
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Lots of happy ink: Mars Phoenix has somethin’ in the oven.

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:52:33 -0400

A truly exasperating hangup for the rather simple, brilliantly executed Mars Phoenix mission to the red planet’s icy arctic soil seems to have settled out. Dirt that wouldn’t fall past screens into its chemical and physical analytic chamb
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The Age: World’s oldest woman leaves body to science. Her brain is 115 and not a hint of Alzheimers

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:24:21 -0400

In Australia at The Age Jill Stark brings readers evidence that, maybe, even if we live an incredibly long time we may not encounter dementia, Alzheimer’s included. Researchers in Holland report that, more than 30 years after an elderly woman a
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NYC LSAMP Alumni becomes GRF Recipient in Electrical Engineering

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:38:55 -0400

Jumie Yuventi is a 2008 NSF GRF recipient in Electrical Engineering. Jumie plans to use the fellowship to continue his work in Engineering Education, Micro-architecture and circuitry at Stanford University beginning in fall 2008. Before graduating
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Ice Shelf Instability

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 11:45:08 -0400

Guest contribution from Mauri S. Pelto Ice shelves are floating platforms of ice fed by mountain glaciers and ice sheets flowing from the land onto the ocean. The ice flows from the grounding line where it becomes floating to the seaward front, where
Source: RealClimate

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Boston Globe: Horseshoe Crabs - and a tiny thing on immune therapy

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 19:08:50 -0400

The Tracker noted, in the roundup of Tuesday’s NYT ScienceTimes a sterling story by Natalie Angier on horseshoe craps. It turns out it wasn’t the day’s only horseshoe crab story - The Globe’s Beth Daley wrote them up, too, inc
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Baltimore Sun, Bend Bulletin: An energy-wise movement? Hypermilers, and country folk trading in their trucks

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 18:47:17 -0400

The Tracker spotted two stories this morning that aren’t quite science (not close really) but have to do with energy and that has to do with climate policy. I almost passed them by but they struck as such a quick one-two punch … here goe
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Science News: On polar bears and oil’s cost, in a blog

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 18:04:07 -0400

Reporter Janet Raloff entertained The Tracker this morning via her blog at the Science News site. She writes that she got somewhat baited and switched by the American Enterprise Institute when it invited her to a panel discussion with an economist an
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Time Magazine - On nukes, and an old bromide about meters

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 17:34:50 -0400

It’s right there in the lede on a Time Magazine Bryan Walsh article about the viability of nuclear power. “It was going to be too cheap to meter.” This horse was out of the barn long ago and has had foals, so perhaps comment is frui
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Wires, Brit press, etc: New UN Atlas of Africa shows wide climate change impacts

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:49:25 -0400

At an African ministerial conference in Johannesburg the United Nations Environment Program unveiled an atlas of photographic and other evidence, nearly 400 pages long, showing that climate change there goes far beyond melted glaciers on Kilimanjaro,
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Sacramento Bee: Is Suisun Bay’s bad water (maybe it’s the ammonia) why fish are fading from the SF Bay Delta?

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:01:43 -0400

The Sacramento Bee’s environmental writer Matt Weiser has stirred up a bit of polite blowback from the local water treatment agencies. It follows a story that ran last week on a hypothesis why salmon, smelt, striped bass, and other ocean-going
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Etsy Wednesday: Biology Textbook Magnets

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:24:42 -0400

Magnets made from vintage biology textbooks.
Source: easternblot.net

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Lots of advance ink: Gamma ray news. NASA gets ready, after a delay, to blast Glast into space

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:05:31 -0400

GLAST stands for Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope. After many delays NASA plans to send the $690 million telescope into orbit tomorrow or soon thereafter aboard a Delta II launcher. By gathering high energy gamma rays astronomers hope to learn mo
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Reuters, AP, etc: That town-drowning Indonesian mud volcano definitely triggered by a gas well

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:07:37 -0400

About two years ago news began filtering out of Indonesia of a colossal environmental catastrophe. (See earlier post Oct. 6 2006). Near a gas drilling operation a vent opened, gushing hot mud driven by a suddenly liberated, pressurized aquifer about
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Columbus Dispatch: Tracking snakes by radio

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:51:42 -0400

The Dispatch’s Kevin Mayhood gives readers a pretty good idea today why they don’t see too many rattlesnakes in the Ohio woods. They’re out there all right. But even with radio transmitters embedded in their bodies it takes a good
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NYTimes ScienceTimes: Plants that sense family, horseshoe crabs, gay marriage lessons for all mariages, neighborhood weasels,

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:31:22 -0400

The Tracker took the NYTimes’s ScienceTimes out this morning and…deja vu all over again. Adorning the lead article, on plants that sense kin - and prey - is a shot of a dodder weed tendril wrapping the stem of a tomato plant seedling. Ha
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YouTube Tuesday: Bird of Paradise

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:59:10 -0400

This is part of the Planet Earth series (sound isn’t so good, but it was the only short clip with just this bird that I could find) And here the same scene is re-enacted by humans:
Source: easternblot.net

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AP, etc: After surgery, the glioma options for Sen. Kennedy

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:41:14 -0400

In the week following Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s surgery to remove a large fraction of his malignant glioma brain tumor - and while much of the news has dealt with his continuing mettle and heartiness - a few medical writers have again wad
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CBC Quirks and Quarks: A roundup on Vitamin D’s new prestige, plus a frog with claw, ancient motherhood, and what a good felt tip can do for a bird’s ego

Mon, 9 Jun 2008 18:46:14 -0400

The Tracker concedes to not have had time this morning before email time to listen to even one of these segments that broadcast Saturday on the Canadian Broadcast Corp’s radio show Quirks and Quarks. But the lineup is a rather fascinating one c
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Reuters: Indonesia volcano spews

Mon, 9 Jun 2008 17:59:23 -0400

Indonesia’s Mount Soputan on Sulawesi is in full eruption, ash and gases going up while lava runs down its slopes. Reuters’s Telly Nathalia brings us a brief but nicely informative report. It’s worth a post partly on the strength of
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Wires, etc: Mars Phoenix can’t seem to get the first load in the hole

Mon, 9 Jun 2008 16:54:50 -0400

Basketball teams on a cold streak ask: Did somebody put a lid on that hoop? The same kind of question may be going around NASA’s Mars Phoenix research team about now. The near-flawless landing of the north polar excavator and soil-analyzer has
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Minneapolis Star-Tribune: A “home run” in stem cell therapy? One little boy’s parents would say yes.

Mon, 9 Jun 2008 16:18:12 -0400

Last week the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune’s Josephine Marcotty revealed that a U. of Minnesota medical team seems to have cured a youngster of a dreadful skin disease. They gave him a bone marrow transplant including a load of stem cells
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Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star: Yikes - squirmy ball of reptiles comin’ this way

Mon, 9 Jun 2008 15:10:12 -0400

Mix something weird with a news writer who has the wit to send some pics to a pertinent researcher or two and you may well get a lively story - in this case, for the Monday paper. That is, sometimes a story just falls into your lap or rolls out of th
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Chem & Engr News: So THIS is what SciFest Africa is all about

Mon, 9 Jun 2008 14:03:52 -0400

Last week The Tracker posted on a roundup of science news and science journal articles from Africa that ran on the SciDev.net news service’s wire. Casting about with the help of search engines for a pic broadly on the theme of science on th
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Things to read

Mon, 9 Jun 2008 00:02:40 -0400

A thing I wrote: The article I wrote on OpenCourseWare is available in an easy to read online format after all! A thing I read: I read this awesome New Yorker article “Darwin’s Surprise” about human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) w
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BBC: In the microwaves, a faint whiff of the time before Big Bang’s time?

Fri, 6 Jun 2008 18:52:47 -0400

At the American Astronomical Soc’s meeting in St. Louis, Caltech physicists said they think, maybe, they discern the fingerprints on our universe left by another universe from which it bubbled, sprang, diverged, or otherwise got delivered in th
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Scotsman: Dinosaurs had worries, too. The amygdala says so.

Fri, 6 Jun 2008 18:19:16 -0400

In today’s Scotsman a piece by Craig Brown, at first, seems to be making no sense at all. Then it comes clear. One might, in fact, be able to speculate responsibly about the moods of dinosaurs and the neural processes that modulated them. The n
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Media in India, Pakistan, S. Africa..: Watchword for public health in one word - toilets.

Fri, 6 Jun 2008 16:55:30 -0400

Grist for the Mill first today. A stalwart reader of The Tracker asked this morning if this Press Release had passed over our transom. (Answer is no.) She asked if it might have gotten any pickup. She wrote, “it is one of the most unusual appr
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