Compared to dark energy or fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, dark matter is not quite so daunting to explain.  It is indirectly detected through its gravitational pull on visible matter – stars and galaxies. There's a lot of it and we don't know what it's made of but scientists have their theories. And so there was some fanfare made over the results of an experiment called AMS meant to detect positrons that would theoretically be emitted if antimatter takes a particular form, called WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), and these said WIMPs collide.

The experiment is also interesting because it was conceived by particle physicist Sam Ting, and because it’s flying on the International Space Station. The results were not definitive, but there was enough to work with.

I was disappointed to see little if any explanation for why the experiment flew on ISS and not some unmanned craft. Or why it was so atronomically expensive at $1.6 billion.  

Most stories were also weak on the essential background needed to understand why scientists believe dark matter takes the form of some as-yet-undetected kind of particle and not just rocks or planets or dust or other matter that doesn’t show up or why these particles would emit positrons when they collide - it's really not obvious to general readers.

There are good explanations that go back to our understanding of the big bang and limits on how much ordinary matter can exist. There are also good explanations for why some think dark matter takes this particular form that behaves in this peculiar way.

The stories on this latest finding also gave varying estimates for the percentage of our universe made up of dark matter – some said about 80% and others about a quarter.  The answer, I am pretty sure, depends on whether you count dark energy as part of the make-up of the cosmos or not.

At the New York Times, Dennis Overbye contributed a detailed, fairly coherent story with one of the most wishy-washy quotes I’d seen for some time:

“I don’t think it makes you believe it must be dark matter, nor do I think it makes you believe it cannot be,” said Neal Weiner, a particle theorist at New York University.

Here’s how he explains the goal:

According to recent measurements by the Planck spacecraft, about 27 percent of the universe, by mass, is composed of some unknown form of matter unlike the atoms that make up us and everything we can see. Astronomers cannot see it, but they can detect its gravitational tug pulling the galaxies and stars around.

I found this paragraph confusing because the Planck results are new and obviously the designer of AMS did not know about them.  The story would have made a lot more sense if it had included how we came to understand not just the presence of dark matter but the expectation that it would take the form of some new particle. What were scientists thinking about dark matter when they built AMS and did Planck change anything critical or just offer a refinement?

At AP, Seth Borenstein and John Heilprin employed a sleuthing concept, but the story didn’t explain why this experiment had anything more to do with detective work than any other science project. Read the whole story here.

GENEVA (AP) — It is one of the cosmos' most mysterious unsolved cases: dark matter. It is supposedly what holds the universe together. We can't see it, but scientists are pretty sure it's out there.

Led by a dogged, Nobel Prize-winning gumshoe who has spent 18 years on the case, scientists put a $2 billion detector aboard the International Space Station to try to track down the stuff. And after two years, the first evidence came in Wednesday: tantalizing cosmic footprints that seem to have been left by dark matter.

The story in the Washington Post by Joel Achenbach brought the lofty concepts down to earth. It really is possible to write about dark matter so that regular people can follow you.  Read it here.

Here’s how he describes the experiment in one beautifully clear sentence:

It detects cosmic rays, which are particles moving at extraordinary velocity and coming from all over the galaxy. The AMS sorts through the particles, measuring their momentum and charge.

And see how his explanations of positrons and dark matter are simpler and more real than anyone else’s:

A small percentage of the particles that hit the detector are unusual things called positrons, which are like electrons but with the opposite charge. They’re in the class of particles known as antimatter.

Another theorized source of positrons is dark matter. If antimatter seems exotic, dark matter is even more so. No one has ever seen the stuff, and its existence has never been nailed down definitely. Dark matter emits and absorbs no light, and interacts with ordinary matter in a ghostly fashion, primarily through gravity. Dark matter is thought to affect the way galaxies move; they rotate in a manner that suggests that they are carrying some unseen load. In the past two decades, other experiments and detectors have bolstered the idea that dark matter is far more abundant than ordinary matter.

Achenbach makes it look easy. It's hard to write this way, but it sure is nice and easy on the readers. And that’s what we should be striving for – especially in stories about such difficult topics.

David Ewalt at Forbes started with this lede, which confused me because we already had indirect evidence for dark matter from its gravitational pull and we even have estimates for how much is supposed to be there. Read the whole story here.

Researchers working with NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy announced on Wednesday that they may have found evidence of dark matter, an elusive substance that scientists believe constitutes a majority of the mass in our universe, but until now have been unable to actually detect.

At the Los Angeles Times Amina Khan who led this way.

Let that long-held breath out, folks. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer has picked up a lot of mysterious antimatter in low Earth orbit – but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a sign of dark matter.

 There was something weirdly insider-ish about it that I did not get. Did she think regular people on the street were actually worked up about AMS or was it supposed to sarcastic? Read the rest here.

Other stories included this one by Carolyn Johnson at the Boston Globe, and this one by Jeffry Brumfiel at NPR

Apparently the brain is not the only organ that’s somewhat larger in human beings than in other apes. I knew when I saw a press release from PNAS announcing a new study on penis size and female preference that this research would get some attention.  

Speculation goes back at least to Jared Diamond’s early book, Why Sex is Fun, in which he ponders why the human member is bigger than necessary to do its job.

Biologist Brian Mautz decided it was finally time to investigate, suspecting that it had something to do with sexual selection driven by female preference. So he exposed Australian female subjects to computerized images of male figures, varying in height, body shape and penis size. They found bigger was more attractive, though there was a point of diminishing returns, and body shape was a more important factor.

Online stories appeared in The New York Daily News, the Daily Beast, Boston,com, the Atlantic Wire, Science News, Gawker and dozens of other varied news outlets.

The most interesting and well-executed story I saw was this one by Rachel Ehrenberg in Science News. She included all kinds of interesting information about genital evolution in ducks and other species. The story really needed this kind of context. I did laugh at the way she phrased this line:

The handful of studies that have examined whether penis length in Homo sapiens affects attractiveness have looked at penis size alone, rather than size as part of a package of traits.

National Geographic’s Christine Dell’Amore wrote this online story headlined: Women prefer bigger penises, may have shaped evolution.

It wasn’t entirely clear whether the women or the penises shaped evolution.

The story included an outside source broaching a subject some have dubbed, “growers vs. showers.”  

But evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup, Jr. said in an email that there are some limitations to the team's theory that female choice played a role in penis evolution.

For one, previous studies have shown that "the flaccid human penis is an imperfect indicator of the size of the erect penis," said Gallup, of the State University of New York at Albany, who was not involved in the study.

The researchers claimed their figures were supposed to represent men in the flaccid state, perhaps reflective of some imagined pre-historic time when women could evaluate potential mates as they gamboled about in the nude. But from the look of the featureless images it wasn’t clear whether some of them were well-endowed or just becoming happy to see us.

Onward to Time, where a healthland blog post had the following link stuck in the middle: (MORE: Add Inches!! No, Really, Men Can Make It Longer).

For visuals, many news outlets relied on images of a clothed Jon Hamm - the actor who plays Don Draper in Mad Men. I wasn’t up on popular culture enough to know he’s allegedly extraordinarily well endowed, and I’m still not sure how this became such common knowledge.

Most of the stories were pretty indistinguishable from one another. Few focused on why, of all the possible science questions to investigate, researcher Brian Mautz picked this. And how did he feel about the results? And what did his parents think of all this? 

There were a couple of stories with interesting ledes, including this one by sex/science book co-author Brian Alexander appearing in Today.com:

The human male possesses the Italian designer faucet of penises. They’re pretty big, the biggest of any primate’s relative to body size. And they’re showy, too, right out there, front and center on our upright bodies (i.e., they don’t retract), as if they were meant to be seen as part of the décor. Why?

Next time I see Jon Hamm in Mad Men I’m going to think of an Italian designer faucet.

The Times of India stood out for actually running the headline, “Men with Larger Tools Attract Women.”

Several writers expressed skepticism over whether size was a big factor in mate selection. But the study didn’t really claim that it was.

The women were seeing faceless figures. They could judge only height, body proportions and penis size. Even then the bigget factor was body shape (see image for reassurance. ) The subjects had no information about intelligence, personality, facial features, stock portfolio, cooking ability or sense of humor.  

And the researchers seemed to be claiming that perhaps size was a bigger factor before clothes were invented, as explained in this quote by one of the co-authors: “Humans have slightly longer and notably thicker penises for their body size compared to other primates. It’s been suggested that before humans wore clothes, females used penis size as one of the deciding factors when choosing a mate….’’ he said.

In light of that, the best kicker was from Chris Gayomali at The Week:  

Oh. Thank goodness for clothes, then. And having a face.

Gary Schwitzer of HealthNewsReview.org has pointed me to an incisive and entertaining post by a Canadian writer who makes toast of Gwyneth Paltrow's new cookbook, "It's All Good: Delicious, Easy Recipes That Will Make You Look Good and Feel Great." 

The blogger is Julia Belluz, the senior editor at The Medical Post. The blog is Science-ish, a joint project of the Canadian publications Maclean's and the Medical Post, and the McMaster Health Forum at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. And the post should put Paltrow out of business. 

"Science-ish was immediately stung by the panorama of pseudoscience premises on which the cookbook rests," writes Belluz. She continues:

[Paltrow] undergoes what sounds like every medical test imaginable, and finds she has a thyroid problem, anemia, vitamin D deficiency, a congested liver, hormones that were “off,” and “inflammation” in her system. “Another roster of tests” exposed “high levels of metals and a blood parasite.” Mixing her young children into the madness, she gets them tested for food sensitivities, too, and finds they are all intolerant of gluten, dairy, and chickens’ eggs, among other things.

Some of the ailments, such as "inflammation in her system," Belluz writes, "are questionable bordering on quackish," but "the most distressing part of the book is what comes next." Really? How much worse can this get?

Paltrow's doctor, instead of addressing Paltrow's complaints in the usual way, "advises she cut out basically everything but quinoa and lettuce," Belluz writes. "No meat, potatoes, sugar, dairy, eggs, coffee, alcohol, wheat, and, oddly, bell peppers, corn, and eggplant." And she prescribes this to readers of the book, Belluz writes.

"The enduring question that Paltrow’s book raises is why we continually buy into the junk advice of celebrity health promoters who have no specialization in health and everything to gain from us believing their claims."

I know the answer to that one. It's because they are so good at presenting it. Celebrities become celebrities because a lot of people like them, or find them amusing, or find their work touching and profound. Celebs know how to tell a story and how to move people, and that works whether they are playing Shakespeare, Shakespeare in Love, or the role of a diet guru. 

Need another timely example? Watch Jeremy Irons talking to HuffingtonPost  about gay marriage. He's saying something about taxes, fathers marrying sons, incest, and dogs. It makes even less sense than Paltrow.

But he says it so well.

-Paul Raeburn

   Sam Ting to the rescue of an intellectual legacy for ISS?

   For years - since well before 1998 when the International Space Station finally started coming together in orbit thanks to the genuinely heroic work of engineers and astronauts - many including yours truly have scoffed at it as a waste of money. Just to design and build it (marvelous USA Today graphic) cost around $100 billion. I can't lay hands on the operating budget, but it cannot be small. It's a waste, at least, if one scores it on scientific merit rather than as a display of mostly-US aerospace engineering prowess and dominance. Just maybe, the worm is turning. Not that this complex of solar panels, pressurized modules, and docking ports for space freighters devoted mostly to keeping a few people alive inside to run the place will go down as an entirely sensible investment. But even if automated platforms could have done nearly all of it cheaper, there is no undoing the ISS and it may soon be accumulating a resume of meaningful, grandly important bits of pure and applied research.

  Last week tracker Faye Flam's roundup post here at the tracker looked over accounts by the world's science press on hints of paydirt from a big detector that astronauts fastened two years ago to one of the  space station's girders. It is not the first experiment to do so, but it has revealed the strongest signs yet of an unexpected irregularity in the flow of antimatter particles streaming in from way out there.  According to the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer experiment team, led by Nobel-winning physicist Samuel Ting of MIT, the data meander might be handiwork by particles of that elusive inter-galactic glue, dark matter. If so, that's fab. Dark matter is a tantalizing mystery of the first rank, inferred by such subtle but vast effects as gravitational interference with the rotations and relative motions of clustered galaxies. At a guess only dark energy with its confusingly similar name out-ranks dark matter among cosmic stumpers.

   Maybe the Alpha detector's A-level adventure in science aboard the ISS is even a trend. If one goes by media attention one has  a few hints to go on including:

  1) NICER, for Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer, has been given a green-light by NASA as an Explorer-class mission (which means fairly modest by space-dollar standards, or less than $55 million). It is to be hooked to ISS in 2017. It will not only gather information on the physics of neutron stars, but use their pulsar emanations as beacons to undergird a sort of global positioning system for the whole solar system.

    Stories:

• SEN (space exploration network) - Elizabeth Howell: New NASA mission to probe celestial lighthouses ;

• Nature World News (not to be confused with Nature magazine news) Tamarra Kemsley: NASA Announced Plans To Explore Neutrons (sic) Stars - The Zombies of Space ;

Grist for the Mill: NASA Goddard Press Release ;

2) Quantum entanglement - Plans are afoot to put an experiment aboard ISS to give so-called spooky action at a distance its toughest test so far. The orbiting instruments also should anchor a prototype global quantum communication network. Whatever that means.

• LiveScience - Clare Moskowitz: Space Station May Test 'Spooky' Enganglement Over Largest Distance Yet.

• Extreme Tech - Sebastion Anthony: European scientists propose world's largest quantum network, between Erth and the ISS ; 

Grist for the Mill: Institute of Physics (UK) Press Release ;  New Journal of Physics article abstract ;

   These last items didn't get much attention from major media. But they and the dark matter data coming in from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer  do seem to signal a new rigor to research on board the station, as though it is assuming a role in major league science. None of the coverage that met the tracker's eye makes note of this angle, a transition from highest hi-tech trailer park ever to serious international laboratory. It is a theme worth a deeper look than this post's quick riff.

    To be sure, if one reads NASA's websites the impression one gets of the International Space Station is that it has been aswarm with nifty science all along. An agency-sponsored blog called A Lab Aloft has a post up right now on the research by a university group whose project - tended by astronauts - explores plant signaling. The young principal investigator declares, and there's little doubt of its truth to her, that the work is inspiring and generates immense enthusiasm among students on the team. Another post reviews the 2012 science year on ISS, listing studies of productivity in the world's oceans as sensed from orbit, refinement of space applications for robots, bone loss in microgravity, effects on microgravity on astronauts' and other occupants' vision, and the slow flames and distinctive rates of chemical reactions that occur in the spherical zones of burning around bits of lit fuel. Elsewhere, we find a perennial topic for NASA's p.r. machine - a talk session between school children (in Texas, this time) and astronauts aboard ISS.

  In 2008, when major construction was largely complete, NASA released a long report on what science had already been done by astronauts and other ISS crewmembers when not tied up by construction and maintenance tasks. It listed more than 100 research projects and experiments. Most appear to revolve around space station science that studied the space station itself, durability of materials in space, and the biological side of living and traveling in space generally. It has been decent research so far, but self-referential - not much of the sort that changes the way we view ourselves or the workings of the cosmos. No wonder the station has such a low profile in both public and scientific consciousness.