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Knight Science Journalism Tracker Home Suggest Stories About Us Staff Contact Us Log In Register to Comment Lots of Ink: Keystone oil pipeline get nixed for now. What’s it mean?

The decision by the White House to, at least for now, block permits for the Keystone pipeline and thus stall Canadian shale-oil crude from reaching Texas refineries, plus delay or nix all the jobs building it would bring, is news that hardly anybody who pays attention will have missed.

It would have gotten a pass here at ksjtracker, except eye happened to fall on a superbly wide-angle look at it, found at the BBC by its enviro correspondent Richard Black. Leave it to the outsider to give a fine rendering of the larger facets of the decision while not getting bogged down in the sticky details of this heavy oil from north of the border. Black dances quickly through the political meaning on both the small and large scale, its history, and runs a map from the pipeline’s main backer showing the plain fact of the matter that pipes loaded with the stuff already reach into Oklahoma, so keeping Canadian tar sand glop out of [...]

Time, Scientific American, etc: Amazon Basin shifting from carbon sink, to source?

A long and densely illustrated review paper in Nature this week has a lot of ifs, maybes, and possibles in it but not enough to stop it from being troubling. Fifteen authors – the lead from Woods Hole Research Center with others from Brazilian and US institutions – decided after scouring the literature and combing through their own studies that the Amazon basin is changing in fundamental ways. Reasons include El Niño-type rhythms of drought and downpour and other more or less natural cycles, but land-clearing, agriculture, and climate change are the prime drivers, it says. Maybe. Or probably.

It says there are signs of a transition away from approximate equilibrium, and net absorption of carbon, to a “disturbance-dominated regime” and net emission of element #6 that had been stored in standing biomass and other organic matter. (If clicking doesn’t yield a higher-def version of Illus, try this).

Well sure, haven’t we been hearing this kind of thing for a long time? This review is the [...]

La protesta frente a SOPA muy seguida por medios latinoamericanos. Polémica Chile-Brasil por financiación Gran Telescopio, y en España-Alemania por empresa captado transplantes. Dengue en Bolivia y biomarcadores para Chagas

(English intro to Spanish lang text) Newspapers in Latin America give heavy coverage to Internet, social networks or information technologies. Yesterday’s SOPA protests are illustration. As an example, the protest occupies most of the front page in El Comercio (Perú). In Bolivia, Chile and many other countries’ papers we find long stories explaining the situation and how this US-law would affect the entire world.

One other topics we find two polemics in the press this week. 1) In Chile, the construction of the world’s biggest telescope by ESO is delayed because Brazil is not confirming the 300 million dólars that it previously committed to the project. If it’s not confirmed, the $1500 million program could be stopped. 2) In Spain, last week a German company is recruiting Spanish bone marrow donors without the consent of the local health authorities. It is seen as an illegal act that endangers the Spanish system of organ donations, one that makes it a world leader. The company defended itsel,f saying that it’s acting for [...]

Nature News: Who knew? A pair of giant telescopes have been star-crossed for years

Astronomy writers write, natch, about astronomy and its discoveries across the entire universe. But it looks like they – make that we, as I’ve written a lot – missed one astronomy story right under our noses. It’s probably just the nature of the beat and the sorts of writers attracted to it. There is no time or room in public media to get in more than a tiny fraction of the dizzying theories and observations and big fights among astronomers over what they mean. So who has time for a story on telescope management and budget errors or bad judgment on what hardware to install? Might seem boring, or a distraction from the enthralling science, or even churlish for a reporter to visit all the interesting labs and stuff and then tell the world the scientists there are wasting public money. Our trade does have an unusual share of cheer leaders for the merits of the beat and people we cover. That can blinker us.

Among the big guns in [...]

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