Sea turtles dispersed, dispersants disputed, health effects discussed, space policy dissed. Plus dispensing with digital Babel.
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TOO OILY TO TELL ABOUT THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF SEA TURTLES. How's this for a massive natural history experiment: Some 700 sea turtle nests in Alabama and Florida are to be dug up by hired contractors and the eggs flown to a lab where they will hatch. That's the plan, anyway. The resulting tens of thousands of turtle hatchlings will then be transported to oil-free Atlantic beaches and released to frolic in the foreign seas.
Lauren Schenkman reports for SciencInsider:
Translocation of nests on this scale has never been attempted before. "This is really a worst-case scenario," says Michael Ziccardi, a University of California, Davis, veterinarian and oil-spill veteran who is leading the government's response efforts for marine mammals and sea turtles. "We hoped we wouldn't get to this point."
Schenkman also reports that at least the first 67 dead sea turtles studied among the 400-plus turtle corpses found on Gulf of Mexico beaches recently probably did not die oily deaths. The weapon may have been shrimp nets.
TOO OILY TO TELL ABOUT OIL DISPERSANT TOXICITY TOO. Last week's post mentioned that the Environmental Protection Agency was preparing to report results of its toxicity testing on 8 commercial chemicals used to disperse oil. EPA issued the report commendably promptly, but you may have heard nothing about it since it landed with a muted thud.
Perhaps that's because it confirmed industry's repeated declarations that oil dispersants are not nearly as toxic as the oil they're dispersing. Left up in the air, however, was the question of whether BP should be using something other than its dispersant of choice, Corexit, on the massive Gulf oil spill.
David Biello describes EPA's results — and the serious work that still remains — at SciAm's Observations. As Daniel Cressey points out at Nature's The Great Beyond, more research is needed. That's what science writers love to hear.
EPA is not exploring entirely new territory. A brief online summary of a 2005 National Research Council report, Understanding Oil Spill Dispersants: Efficacy and Effects, has also been posted online. Find it here.
BUT NOT TOO OILY TO CONSIDER HUMAN HEALTH EFFECTS. Those of us who write about medicine should brace for a gusher of studies on human health too. They will go on for years. Indeed, they have already begun.
The government asked the Institute of Medicine to examine the range of spill-related health issues, and IOM plunged in quickly with a two-day meeting late in June. The purpose was to review current knowledge, explore ways of identifying at-risk populations and monitoring their health, and — prick up your ears here — "Consider effective ways to communicate with those at risk for health problems, taking culture, understanding of health information, language, technology, and geography into account."
Aw, you missed it? No you didn't. Just visit here and click on "View Available Sessions." Free, and as far as I can tell, IOM has posted a Webcast of every session in the whole two days. Knock yourself out.
NO MOON AT ALL, UP ABOVE. I don't write much about space, so I'm doubtless clueless on the subtleties, but blogging about the Administration's just-announced space policy(ies) seemed all over the place. Bloggers mostly agreed on one point, though. The document exhibited what Eric Hand at The Great Beyond called "a continued push to get the government out of the rocket business." I.e., an emphasis on commercial space flight.
What first caught my eye was Yudhijit Bhattacharjee's post at ScienceInsider, which emphasized commercial flight but also plans for two human missions, to an asteroid by 2025 and Mars ten years later. Nothing about the Moon. Maybe the document's mention of manned spaceflight was just a token bone tossed to the very emphatic boosters of human missions, because other bloggers didn't seem interested.
The national security analysis of the space policy at Danger Room is accompanied by a smashing photo of Obama wielding a light saber, and I doubt that it's a Photoshopped item. Here Spencer Ackerman picks up on the ready-made Jedi knight metaphor and concludes that, for all its talk about cooperation among nations, the statement makes clear that the Administration is not quite backing away from George W. Bush's rejection of any limitations on US actions in space. Underscoring that observation, Ackerman points out that there's an unreleased section of the space-policy document that's classified.
Priorities like these may be one reason why space science was so little in evidence in the document. Hand notes that science talk was limited almost entirely to restating NASA's newly bestowed navel-gazing mission, wherein space telescopes are reoriented and trained on Earth, searching for clues to climate change. The 14-page mission statement, he noted, stuffed astrophysics, heliophysics, planetary science, and exobiology into a single sentence. A long sentence, but still.
I suspect that Keith Cowling's analysis at NASA Watch clarifies why, after all this analysis, I remain befuddled:
OK, so the White House makes all sorts of budgetary and contractual changes to NASA programs with little or no advanced warning, questionable pre-coordination, bad rollout - all with no cogent space policy in evidence. Chaos ensues. And then they fiddle with it. Now they are going to actually release a space policy - but only after all of their earlier efforts at NASA have run into brick walls (Congress). Is this going to clarify things - or just make things even more confusing? Stay tuned.
A DIGITAL GLOSSARY FOR THE REST OF US. The invaluable Dodi Schultz has brought to my attention a new service from the invaluable Poynter Institute: Digital Journalist Survival Guide: A Glossary of Tech Terms You Should Know, by Jennifer 8. Lee. Poynter may have intended the guide for journalists, but anybody who wanders through the Internet pipes can find comfort and illumination here.
The guide tells me that "blog" has become a Scrabble-acceptable word. With that imprimatur, who can now argue that blogging is not a mainstream, grown-up form of communication?
