Blue Collar Scientist

Jack Klugman has made two television ads for First Freedom First.

Hat tip to Bay of Fundie.

For years now, nutria have been destroying wetlands in the southern United States.

In case you aren’t familiar with nutria, they are rodents, they live in wetlands and eat plant roots, and they look like this:

The are also reportedly classified by some Catholic dioceses as “fish” for purposes of eating. Like during lent, or something. If you still observe the fish on Friday tradition, maybe you could call up the bishop, savage both Linnean taxonomy and phylogenetics in one symbolic act of antiscience dissent, and try some Nutria Fondue. Or maybe you could do it anyway, without actually having to believe rodents are fish. Really, do it either way - I’m a big proponent of trying new foods.

Anyway, my nominee for worst press release in the history of science comes to my attention via Science Daily. They publish generally slightly reworked press releases, and don’t bother to link back to the originals these days, so it is just possible that Science Daily, and not the originating institution is responsible for this. Either way, someone needs to be sent out to find a new job, because they have no business whatever communicating science to laypeople.

Here’s how it starts.

A 10-pound rodent pest called nutria ravaging southern wetlands in the US, which has been especially damaging to the marshland ecology in the Mississippi Delta following Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, may have finally met its match thanks to molecular science that includes the work of Professor Athula B. Attygalle, an expert in molecular chemistry and mass-spectrometry based at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, and a team of scientists from Cornell University and University of Iowa.

Ok, that’s not too bad - but that is just one sentence. One really long sentence. There is enough there to grasp the good news - there’s been an advance in nutria control in the southern United States! But that’s not really the motive of the person writing this release. They aren’t crowing about an advance in nutria control. The big accomplishment from their perspective is more like this:

Good news - we’ve managed to cram our names and institutional affiliations into the very first sentence of the press release!!! Whooooohooooo!

It continues:

To get a sense of their [nutria] productivity, 20 nutria brought to Louisiana in the 1930s bred an estimated 20 million animals within two decades, according to a wildlife group in Maryland that tracks nutria data, quoted in a recent report by Louisiana journalist Chris Kirkham.

Was it really too much trouble to just call up this nebulous, unnamed “wildlife group in Maryland” and cut out the middleman called “Louisiana journalist Chris Kirkham?” Where does this sort of thing end? My neighbor told me that her cousin said that her friend from high school told her that his buddy from LA told him that he had heard that….

“Several volatile compounds, including terpenoids, fatty alcohols, fatty acids and some of their esters, were identified from solvent extracts prepared from anal scent glands of nutria, a.k.a. coypu,” said Attygalle.

Oy. Let’s get some media training for Dr. Attygalle. Please. Because this is not a sentence that should ever have actually been spoken by any human being¹. In particular, nobody should be saying “a.k.a.” in a spoken sentence about wildlife. Maybe you would want to say that if you are issuing an APB concerning some cohorts of Bugsy Malone’s, but not when you are talking about nutria, especially not if they’ve already been introduced as the concept at the center of the story.

But this is not the worst of it. I kid you not, but this material is what follows.

Remember, this is from a press release.

Not from the peer-reviewed paper.

From the press release. Which has something to do with nutria control.

The major terpenoid constituents were identified as (E,E)-farnesol and its esters by a comparison of their gas chromatographic retention times, and electron-ionization (EI) and chemical-ionization (CI) mass spectra with those of authentic compounds. EI mass spectra of the four farnesol isomers are very similar, however, the ChemStation (Agilent) and GC–MS Solution (Shimadzu) software algorithms were able to identify the natural compound as the (E,E)-isomer, when a high-quality mass spectral library was compiled from reference samples and used for searching. Similarly, the esters were identified as those of (E,E)-farnesol. In contrast to EI spectra, the CI spectra of the (E,E)- and (E,Z)-isomers are distinctly different from those of the (Z,E)- and (Z,Z)-isomers.

Moreover, the infrared spectrum of the (E,E)-isomer is distinctly different from those of the other three isomers in the 2962–2968 cm - and 2918–2922 cm1 bands, which represent asymmetric CH3 and CH2 stretching vibrations, respectively. Finally, the GC retention indices of farnesol and farnesyl ester isomers determined from authentic samples were used to confirm all identifications.

If you got through all of that, and never at any point felt the slightest glimmer of an inclination to go shoot yourself, or at least go play with your Wii, then congratulations - that’s better than I managed.

Then, the press release takes a sharp - nay, I would describe it as a neck-snapping turn:

For many years, Tabasco sauce magnate E.A. McIlhenny received most of the blame for introducing the rodents from South America to Avery Island in the 1930s.

Tabasco sauce? Ok - that is related to the story after all, but geeze, those are the last words I expected to see here. The release goes on to explain that although this chap has long been blamed, it turned out he wasn’t to blame after all. But then the release says of our Tabasco sauce magnate:

He did eventually set the nutria loose….

Umm - so he’s the guy who was said to have released them, but that turned out to be a myth, but, uhh, he did actually release them after all. Got that?

Historian Shane Barnard continues:

“I’m confident that all the myth has been stripped away”

Really? You are confident of this? Because I’m not at all. The press release leaves me with the impression that Mr. Tabasco Sauce did the deed, and that there’s nothing mythic about it. Unless releasing the nutria was mythic in roughly the same sense as the Pied Piper leading the rats out of Hamelin.

All this Tabasco stuff is a slight diversion in the middle of the press release. It is a little bit of local color in an otherwise Serious Science Story. Which is about nutria control, remember? So based on everything you’ve read so far, what do you think the control method is?

If you are like me, you read all that incomprehensible analytical chemistry stuff quoted up above, and you concluded that the researchers were coming up with a poison. Like maybe some sort of nutria mustard gas, that would allow Bambi and all the other cute, good animals to live, but destroy the nutria like they were in the front lines at Ypres.

If you thought this, you were wrong. Because now, finally, in the very last sentence of the press release, we learn exactly how all this works.

The work of Professor Attygalle and his associates offers an environmentally friendly bait technique intended to lure nutria to traps for transport away from sensitive coastal zones and marshlands.

Ah! Oh my. We’ve finally got the story. They’re gonna trap nutria and move them somewhere. What a relief.

Meanwhile, the PR people are celebrating that they got that name into the first and last sentences of the release. Good going! Champagne for everyone, I’m sure.

I defy anyone to show me a worse science press release than this one.

1. I’ll cut some slack if I find out English is a second language for this speaker. [↩]

The fine folks at the Skeptic Friends Network pointed out this story about the famous polar bear Knut - the baby polar bear who, last year, was the center of some controversy because animal-rights activists wanted Berlin Zoo to kill it:

The idea apparently was that being fed by a human was a fate worse than death for a baby polar bear. In any case, Berlin Zoo decided to give him a shot at life, and a year on, he’s a big, vigorous polar bear. And the Daily Mail thinks he isn’t so cute anymore.

Knut now weighs 22 stone and has six-inch claws and a fearsome set of fangs to match.

That works out to 308 pounds, or if you are living in a country that uses sensible units of measure, 140 kilograms. So apparently Knut has put on some weight - and as any veterinarian will tell you, this is a sign of a healthy, happy animal.

Unfortunately the reporting is not as healthy. The paper runs a photo of Knut giving a little kid a bit of dominance/aggression display. The reporter writes:

Fortunately for the youngster, six inches of glass capable of withstanding a mortar attack separated him from the jaws of the world’s most famous captive bear.

Normally I’d object that Binky is the most famous captive bear, but Binky is an ex-bear, so he probably doesn’t count. But looking at the picture of Knut’s enclosure, I just can’t believe that there is a six inch thickness of glass between the kid and the bear. There’s not nearly enough dispersion and refraction for that; it looks more like an inch or two at the most.

And mortar-proof glass? To hold back a bear? I’ll cop to the glass being shatter-resistant, and set up so that it won’t crumble when cracked or hit by shrapnel, but such glasses can still be penetrated by a high powered rifle bullet - at least the ones I know about. I expect a direct mortar attack would do considerably more damage, I would expect, considering that a mortar can put a hole in a concrete slab and seriously screw up jet aircraft.

But that’s not really the thrust of the article. It’s all about how Knut is a wild animal and no longer cute, cuddly, and harmless. Indeed, the headline reads:

Still think I’m cute? One year on, cuddly Knut has turned into a 22st killing machine

As they say, (sic). Just for the record, I’m living in the 21st century - but I’m not trying to impose anything like that on the rest of you.

USS Lake Erie launches a missile at USA 193. See more at the Department of Defense website.

The DoD has a press release stating that at 10:26 PM EST (6:26 Alaska time), the USS Lake Erie fired a missile that hit the errant National Reconnaissance Office satellite known as USA 193. The missile had no warhead, which supports the DoD’s assertion that they are concerned about an intact hydrazine tank re-entry, and not with preventing classified technology falling into unfriendly hands.

The DoD states that confirmation should be available within 24 hours that the hydrazine was released harmlessly in space. This will be apparent from the decay rate of the satellite’s orbit; with about the same surface area, but much less mass, the orbit will decay noticeably more rapidly than if the hydrazine had not been released.

This provides yet another confirmation of the government’s story that amateur observers can make: Assuming that the satellite is largely intact and still visible, in the event the hydrazine has been released, the satellite should show up later, and on a track that is more westerly, than predictions with the current elements indicate. However, there isn’t much time - the bulk of the orbiting material is expected to re-enter within two days. Heavens Above is still providing easy-to-use predictions on the satellite’s visibility.

UPDATE: DoD says that nothing bigger than a football survived - so much for that! Also, I replaced the picture of USA 193’s launch, to a picture of the launch of the missile that hit it, from the DoD website.

I was interviewed a few days ago by a local radio journalist who was asking whether the interception would be visible from southcentral Alaska. My polished and very educational answer was edited down to a succinct “No, it won’t” for airing. The interest seems to have been generated by the occasional visibility of missiles fired from Kodiak Island, but the ships doing this work were too far to the south and west in the Pacific Ocean, and the satellite much too low, for the interception to be visible.