Over the past few days, I’ve been following a tale of paleontological woe with a surprisingly happy ending.

Matt Wedel, a paleontologist, has been blogging about his experience with a television show on the Discovery Channel called Clash of the Dinosaurs. It didn’t go well. The producers edited Wedel’s interviews to turn his words around 180 degrees. For example, remember that old notion of big dinosaurs having a second brain along their spinal column? Not true! Wedel explained this, but if you tune into the show, you see Wedel essenitally saying, True!

Wedel understandably flipped out. He complained to the producers and got back a non-apology that just made him angrier. He was transformed into the terrible Blogosaurus, and with his resonant nasal cavity he let out a clarion call for his fellow blogosaurs to stampede the production company

I’ve heard this sort of story many times before, and this is where it usually ends. Blogosaurus slinks back to his office and sulks.

But today the story has another ending. Wedel now reports that someone from the Discovery Channel called him up and is going to make things right. I can only guess that blogs do actually make a difference some of the time. Or maybe just this once.

Still, I find this story heartening, because I find science on television to be so vexing. We’re at the point now where all the pieces are in place for some utterly exhilarating programs. We’ve got awesome computer graphics. We’ve got lightweight HD cameras that people can bring to out-of-the-way places. We’ve got scientists ready to give their time and expertise. We’ve got all sorts of innovative ideas about how to make documentaries. Sometimes they add up into good science shows, but rarely great ones. And too often we end up with Clash of the Dinosaurs, or worse.

There are three kinds of terrible science shows on television.

1. The sleepy, dutiful schlep. Just because a show is accurate doesn’t mean that it’s worth watching.

2. The show that’s crazy from the start. Exhibit A: Nostradamus 2012. Just full-goose bozo from scene one, and spreading misinformation far and wide.

3. The show that could’ve been a contender, instead of a bum, which is what it is. Wedel’s experience is a good example of this category. The show sounded great to Wedel when the producers described it to him. But along the way, somebody got the idea stuck in his or her head that it would be so cool for dinosaurs to have a second brain. It would look great. And so great effort and editing was undertaken to achieve that dream–with no apparent interest in whether it was actually true.

I’ve been involved peripherally in some television science shows. In some cases, the producers and I were totally on the same wavelength. I helped them make their shows accurate and clear, and they understood what I was getting at. In other cases, I got stuck in Category Three situations. I had to explain again and again why something in a script was just totally wrong. I wanted to rig up an electrified fence around the falsehood to keep the producers from sneaking back to it. The producers in these particular cases, I suspect, really do just care about the good look–or, rather, they don’t want to spend the time making the truth look good instead.

Wedel has had a small victory in Category Three. The DVD of Clash of the Dinosaurs will get right what the broadcast version got wrong. Wedel’s experience shows that scientists and audience members can have an effect on science TV. And I suspect that it also shows that deep down, television producers know that they can’t do science shows without scientists. (Although there’s always the chance they’ll turn to pseudo-scientists.)

Still, it would have been nice for the show to have been right from the start–and not just right, but to convey how scientists do science. Some have argued that the only way to be sure you don’t get involved in a turkey is to get lawyerly. Get the final approval on all your material in writing.

It’s good advice, up to a point. At best, it leads to a hostile detente between scientists and producers. If scientists just crouch in their offices, ready to thwack any passing television producer with legal documents, I don’t think we’ll see a blossoming of great science TV any time soon. For that to happen, there will have to be deeper partnerships, in which TV folks recognize what science is actually about, and scientists will leave their staid jargon and lecturing styles at the studio door and spend some serious time thinking about what documentaries can achieve.

In the meantime, as my fossiliferous friend Chris Norris notes, there’s always Wikipedia.

[Image: Sauroposeidon, Matt Wedel's beast of choice, via Wikipedia]

The genomes of lung and skin cancer have been decoded by scientists at the UK-based Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge, which is the first time an entire cancer gene map has been created.

The scientists say they have pinpointed specific DNA errors that may cause tumors in these two cancers, both of which have direct known causes—smoking for lung cancer and sun exposure for skin cancer. Researchers predict these maps will offer patients a personalized treatment option that ranges from earlier detection to the types of medication used to treat cancer. The genetic maps will also allow cancer researchers to study cells with defective DNA and produce more powerful drugs to fight the errors, according to the the study’s scientists [CNN]. News reports are heralding the new research as revolutionary, however it will be years, perhaps decades, before the full implications of the work are understood.

The lung cancer and skin cancer studies, which were published in the journal Nature, found the DNA code for a skin cancer called melanoma contained more than 30,000 errors almost entirely caused by too much sun exposure. The lung cancer DNA code had more than 23,000 errors largely triggered by cigarette smoke exposure [BBC News]. The bullet point grabbing most headlines is that the scientists say for every 15 cigarettes a person smokes, they acquire a new mutation in their DNA. Not all of those mutations will be in areas of a person’s DNA related to cancer, but some will.

According to Mike Stratton, of the Cancer Genome Project at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, “these catalogues of mutations are telling us about how the cancer has developed, so they will inform us on prevention. They tell us about all the processes which are disrupted in cancer cells, which we can try to influence through our treatments. So this is a really fundamental moment in the history of cancer research. I can envisage a time a decade or more hence when these catalogues will become routine, and influential in selecting treatment for that individual. That’s what we’re expecting—every cancer patient will have one of these charts” [London Times]. However, just because scientists now possess this genetic information, it doesn’t necessarily mean a cure for cancer is around the corner. The sequencing of the human genome almost 10 years ago had many researchers giddy about the possibility of personalized medicine and gene therapy, but it’s been much harder to translate the genomic data into treatments than many anticipated.

The study is a part of the International Cancer Genome Consortium, which involves countries around the world working on similar cancer-genome-sequencing projects. The UK is looking at breast cancer; the U.S. at brain, ovary, and pancreatic cancer; China at stomach cancer; Japan at the liver; and India at mouth cancer. The completion of all this work is at least five years—and several hundreds of thousand dollars—into the future, say the researchers.

Related Content:
80beats: Can a Genetic Variation Boost Empathy and Reduce Stress?
80beats: What Can We Learn From the Naked Mole Rat’s Immunity to Cancer?
80beats: Murderer With “Violent Genes” Gets Lighter Sentence in Italian Court

Image: iStockphoto

Trigona carbonaria is a bee without a stinger, one of the 10 or so out of 2,000 Australian bee species to lack the feature. This doesn’t appear to have been any concern… at least not until the hive beetle Aethina tumida showed up. This invasive insect may have reached the island continent along with a flock of athletes during the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, and as the name suggests, it like to invade beehives. But it hasn’t been very successful in this case, thanks to creative defensive tactics by the bees.

Since the worker can’t sting, they instead make the beetles into mummies. Workers swarm to the approaching beetle, which adopts the turtle defense–tucking in its head and legs, according to researcher Mark Greco, whose team used CT scans to see the action inside the hive. Then the construction onslaught starts. From BBC News:

This gives the bees an opportunity to mummify their enemy, which they do by coating the invasive parasites in resin, wax and mud.

“The beetles remain in position and eventually starve and shrivel on the spot,” Mr Greco told BBC Earth News.

Within 10 minutes, Greco says, the bee flurry repulses the beetle attack and saves the colony.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Rat Risotto & Emu Chips: Thing Not to Eat in Australia
Discoblog: To Fight Croc-Killing Toads, Australians Turn to “Cane Toad Golf”
Discoblog: Bees on a Plane! 10,000 Bees Swarm an Airplane Wing in Massachusetts

Image: Mark K. Greco

A peculiar flash of light glinting from Saturn’s largest moon confirms what’s been suspected for years: liquid lakes exist on the surface of Titan!

[Click to entitanate.]

The image above was taken on July 8, 2009 by the Cassini spacecraft. Light can reflect off the surface of liquids, producing a little sparkle or glint, called a specular reflection. Knowing that earlier images had shown what look to be lakes of liquid methane on Titan, they kept their eyes open for Cassini’s images of the moon to show such a glint. There are lots of lakes in the northern hemisphere of Titan, making the odds better it would be seen there, but it was only last year that spring sprung in Titan’s northern latitudes. That’s when it was finally possible to see sunlight plinking off of any purported standing liquid.

And that’s what we’re seeing here. They checked to make sure this wasn’t some other source of light like lightning or geologic activity, and were able to trace the position of this glint to the shores of a monstrous lake called, appropriately, Kraken Mare. It’s a sprawling 400,000 square kilometers, bigger than the Caspian sea!

Titan’s atmosphere is thick and hazy, so visible sunlight isn’t strong enough to produce a glint. The image was taken at 5 microns, well into the infrared, where Titan’s atmosphere is essentially transparent. Cassini was about 200,000 km (120,000 miles, about half the distance of the Earth to the Moon) away from Titan when the image was taken.

It’s a cool picture! It looks a lot like images of Earth taken from space. I don’t mean the color or fuzziness — both due to Titan’s smoggy air — but just the way our brain recognizes how a flash of light like that is from liquid. We have to double check our brains, of course, since we’re easily fooled, but the confirmation of it satisfies some part of my own brain that likes to categorize things.

And it also brings home, so to speak, just how Earthlike this alien world is. It has a thick atmosphere, weather, and a hydrological cycle… except where we have water, Titan has methane. And of course it’s incredibly cold there; water would be frozen into ice literally as hard as rock. But liquid on the surface harkens to another part of our brain, the piece that asks if life could arise in such a place.

The answer is, of course, we don’t know. Not for sure. But we can’t rule it out, either.

The more we learn about Titan — and everywhere in our solar system — the more intriguing and beguiling it gets. I know that even now scientists are planning the next generation of exploratory spacecraft. I hope one of them will take a much closer, and much wetter, look at this giant satellite world.