The Great Beyond

It would be unfair to accuse Congress of laziness -- there have been these things called the healthcare and climate/energy bills -- but it's been over a month into the 2010 fiscal year, and Congress still hasn't appropriated money for most science agencies. Thursday night, the Senate passed its version of the Commerce, Justice, Science, or CJS bill -- which contains funding for agencies like NSF and NASA. It now will sent to conference to iron out differences with the previously passed House version, a process that could easily take a month or more.

But if the Senate bill reflects the latest wisdom of the doyens of the Hill (if wisdom is what it is), then science is sitting pretty well. NASA would receive the full $18.7 billion that the Obama administration asked for. Interestingly, language accompanying the bill expresses concern that the International Lunar Network -- a planned system of lunar seismic detectors -- was tied to the human space programme rather than being a justifiable science mission in its own right. The Senate gave it $21 million for continued development.

The NSF would get $6.9 billion, just $130 million below the administration's request. However, the report language expresses concern about workplace environment -- no doubt tied to the porn scandal early this year. But it also questions the NSF's practice of rotating scientists in to the agency on short term appointments. The Senate bill acknowledges that this practice keeps NSF program managers fresh, but says it "creates gaps in management oversight". I wonder how scientists will feel if funding decisions were managed by career civil servants stuck in Washington rather than by their own.

Posted by Eric Hand on November 06, 2009
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Lord Drayson, the UK science minister, has thrown his weight behind a set of demands from the government’s independent advisors which were drawn up in the wake of the controversial sacking of drugs advisor David Nutt.

In an interview with Nature, Drayson also admitted there were concerns among government advisors that pre-date ‘Nutt-gate’. He said at recent meetings “a number of leading scientific advisors across different fields ... expressed to me some underlying concerns”.

“Not a huge concern, bubbling, but it was not just about advice relating to drugs classification,” says Drayson. “What’s happened over the last few days is that sort of bubbling concern has turned into very serious concern because of the events that have taken place.”

Drayson also confirmed the veracity of an email leaked to the Sun newspaper, in which he apparently said he was “pretty appalled” and that the Home Secretary’s decision to sack Nutt was “a big mistake” (see: Cracks show in government over Nutt-gate).

“I can confirm that was an email that I wrote and it reflects how I felt at that point,” he told Nature today. “I learnt about it through a Google Alert, which is not a great way to learn about it.”

An inquiry into the leak – which Drayson says “absolutely was not leaked from my end” – is now underway.

However, Drayson insists that good can still come of the whole affair. He says he backs a set of Principles for the Treatment of Independent Scientific Advice, drawn up by other advisors and leading scientists (see: Home Secretary under fire over ‘Nutt-gate’).

“What I want to do is to be in a position to be able to come out and reassure the scientific community which I know has been very seriously concerned about all this, that the government takes the independence of scientific advice very seriously indeed,” he says.

“I think the principles which were set out yesterday, did provide a very good framework, a starting point, to allow us to confirm these things. I think they reflect a number of things which were in the code of conduct. What I want to do now is … come up with a way of implementing these principles.”

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 06, 2009
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The US Congress is finally taking on the controversial idea of geoengineering — large-scale, deliberate manipulation of the climate system to counteract climate change.

The concept has slowly been creeping into public awareness, including a casual — and much overblown — mention by Obama's science advisor John Holdren in his first interview with the Associated Press.

Yesterday the House committee on science and technology heard testimony from five scientists, including big-name geoengineering proponents people who have called for government support of geoengineering research, including Lee Lane, codirector of the American Enterprise Institute's geoengineering project, Ken Caldeira of Stanford University and John Shepherd of the University of Southampton. Shepherd recently chaired a Royal Society working group, which also included Caldeira and which released a report on geoengineering in September.

In his opening statement, committee chair Bart Gordon emphasized that there are many uncertainties about geoengineering, including the potential for catastrophic side-effects. But, he said, “the climate is changing”, so “we should accept the possibility that certain climate engineering proposals may merit consideration”.

Gordon announced that this hearing would be the first of three or four hearings to explore geoengineering over the next eight months, and that the committee planned to work with the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. The chairman of the Commons committee will testify before the House committee this spring, Gordon said.

Continue reading "Geoengineering in the House" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen on November 06, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The science advisor fired by the UK government last week has penned an editorial explaining his actions.

David Nutt, until Friday the chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), was fired after widespread media attention focused on his comments on the relative risks of legal and illegal substances (see links below).

In a guest editorial in this week’s New Scientist, Nutt says that the UK government is both ignoring its own advisors and “falling out of step” with an international trend towards more liberal drug policies. He writes:

The message for the British government is a simple one: don’t exclude rational argument in order to exploit a visceral public response. Politicians have to win the hearts and minds of their electorate. If your policy is informed by an underlying moral imperative, be open about what that is, and don’t try to disguise it with a veneer of pseudo-science. We ignore scientific evidence at our peril.

Nature has also produced an editorial on Nutt-gate this week. It reads, in part:

Scientific advisers who publicly attack decisions they consider to be less than ideal, and in so doing provide ammunition for political opponents of those decisions, are entering dangerous territory.

Nonetheless, in this case, the position of the Labour government and of the leading opposition party, the Conservatives, which vigorously supported Nutt’s sacking, has no merit at all. It deals a significant blow both to the chances of an informed and reasoned debate over illegal drugs, and to the parties’ own scientific credibility.

Previous Nutt News
Cracks show in government over Nutt-gate – 03 November 2009
Sacked science adviser speaks out - 2 November 2009
Government sacks independent drugs advisor - 30 October 2009
UK government vs its own drugs advisor, Part II - 29 October 2009
Ecstasy advice is a bitter pill - 12 February 2009
Love drug gets politicians fighting - 09 February 2009

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 04, 2009
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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has announced three eminent scientists as the nation's first Science Envoys to the Muslim world. The move is the first concrete indication that the administration is following through on its promise to help ramp up science and technology in Muslim-majority countries (Press Release).

Barack Obama first announced the plan during his June speech at Cairo University, where he pledged to “open centers of scientific excellence in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and appoint new Science Envoys to collaborate on programs that develop new sources of energy, create green jobs, digitize records, clean water, and grow new crops launch a new fund to support technological development in Muslim-majority countries” (New York Times). Two months later at the inaugural meeting of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, science czar John Holdren mentioned that the administration had organized a task force to lead the initiative.

The three envoys, announced yesterday at Clinton's speech in Marrakesh, Morocco:
• Bruce Alberts, a biochemist at University of California, San Francisco who served two terms as president of the National Academy of Sciences and is editor-in-chief of Science
• Dr. Elias Zerhouni, who was director of the National Institutes of Health from 2002 to 2008 and serves on the board of trustees for King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia
• Ahmed Zewail, an Egypt-born Nobel laureate at Cal Tech who also serves on PCAST

From the Nature archives:
Nature special on Islam and Science
Arab science: Blooms in the desert

Posted by Lizzie Buchen on November 04, 2009
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Nature reporter Jeff Tollefson is at the climate negotiations in Barcelona. This is his first blog post from the pre-Copenhagen meeting, cross posted from In the Field.

I arrived at the United Nations climate conference today - late, on the second day, after a red-eye flight over the Atlantic and an all-too-brief nap at the hotel – and encountered drama much sooner than expected. I registered, oriented myself at the conference centre, gathered the requisite daily briefing documents and then found a bathroom to deploy a newly purchased toothbrush.

It was there, after bumping into a colleague, that I learned the African Group had announced at the opening session on Monday that it would boycott the Kyoto Protocol talks until developed countries get serious about their climate commitments.

Continue reading "Barcelona climate: A rough start, tinged with hope" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 04, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Policy, Road to Copenhagen | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The UK government has today published its much publicised framework (see right) on the future of the nation’s universities. It is yet another clearly defined policy for UK universities, and not contradictory at all…

The government wants to prioritise degree courses in science and engineering subjects because of the high level skills they provide students entering the workforce. To do so, it will ramp up competition between universities for public funds for teaching, with the “winners” being those universities that can best provide students with skills that enhance the UK’s competitive advantage. “To allow funds to be diverted to courses that meet strategic skills needs they will be diverted away from institutions whose courses fail to meet high standards of quality or outcome,” it says. The Higher Education Funding Council for England will launch a consultation on how this should be done. Ok so far, although, it’s not yet clear how much money will be diverted and from where.

Continue reading "Mixed messages " »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on November 03, 2009
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The fallout from the UK Home Secretary’s sacking of an independent drugs advisor continues.

Yesterday Alan Johnson appeared in parliament to defend his sacking of David Nutt, who chaired the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. Johnson stressed that he does not see this as an issue about the government’s approach to scientific advice, but about the particulars of Nutt’s case.

“I asked Professor Nutt to resign as my principal drugs adviser, not because of the work of the council but because of his failure to recognise that, as chair of ACMD, his role is to advise rather than to criticise Government policy on drugs,” he told Parliament. “…There is no doubt in my mind that the advice of independent scientific advisers is essential to substantial aspects of the government’s work.”

Johnson also admitted he did not consult the government’s chief scientific adviser John Beddington before sacking Nutt. Beddington told the BBC he agreed with Nutt that cannabis was less harmful than cigarettes and alcohol but wouldn’t say whether he agreed with the sacking.

Johnson may have a bigger problem though. According to the Sun, Science Minister Lord Drayson told the Prime Minister’s office the sacking was “a big mistake” and that he was “pretty appalled”.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has thrown his weight behind Johnson though, telling the Evening Standard “We’ll get tougher on drugs.”

Bizarrely, Brown went on to say, “On climate change, or health, for example, we take the best scientific advice possible. But in an area like drugs we have to look at it in the round.”

If you can work out what that means please let us know.

Previous Nutt News
Sacked science adviser speaks out - 2 November 2009
Government sacks independent drugs advisor - 30 October 2009
UK government vs its own drugs advisor, Part II - 29 October 2009
Ecstasy advice is a bitter pill - 12 February 2009
Love drug gets politicians fighting - 09 February 2009

Image: University of Bristol

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 03, 2009
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Here's the latest in a rash of scientific legal trouble: A University of Florida researcher and his wife have been arrested on charges of defrauding NASA, the Air Force and the US Navy out of millions.

Samim Anghaie, a professor and head of the University of Florida's Innovation Nuclear Space Power and Propulsion Institute, was indicted on 50 counts of wire fraud and 17 counts of money laundering, along with two charges of conspiracy. His wife, Sousan, was also charged with making false statements.

In February the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) raided Anghaie's offices at the University of Florida. They were reportedly looking for evidence that Anghaie had funneled money out of 13 grants totaling US$3.4 million.

According to this article in the Orlando Sentinel, the Anghanies now stand accused of creating fake employment records and depositing paychecks in their own back accounts and the accounts of their sons.

Meanwhile, the couple allegedly ripped off the work of graduate students and postdocs and passed it off as the research of their company, New Era Technology. They also are accused of using data from other laboratories, including one in Russia.

In other scientific lockdown news, lunar researcher Stewart Nozette is being held without bond on espionage charges. Nozette, a long-time NASA and Department of Energy consultant, was arrested in October after he allegedly gave secrets to an FBI agent posing as an Israeli spy.

This hasn't been Nozette's only trouble with the law. The Washington Post reports that he pleaded guilty in January to defrauding NASA and the Department of Defense out of $265,205 between 2000 and 2006. He reportedly used the money to pay off old debts and to cover costs for his swimming pool.

Nozette has pleaded not guilty to the latest charge of attempted espionage. According to the AP the Justice Department could seek the death penalty in the case.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on November 02, 2009
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President Obama has lifted a ban on HIV positive individuals entering the United States.

“If we want to be a global leader in combating HIV-AIDS, we need to act like it,” said Obama on Friday. “That’s why on Monday my administration will publish a final rule that eliminates the travel ban.”

That rule was published today in the Federal Register. It states:

While HIV infection is a serious health condition, it is not a communicable disease that is a significant public health risk for introduction, transmission, and spread to the U.S. population through casual contact. As a result of this final rule, aliens will no longer be inadmissible into the United States based solely on the ground they are infected with HIV, and they will not be required to undergo HIV testing as part of the required medical examination for US immigration.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged other nations which impose travel restrictions on those with HIV to follow America’s lead. According to the UN over 50 countries impose travel restrictions of some kind on HIV positive individuals.

“Placing travel restrictions on people living with HIV has no public health justification. It is also a violation of human rights,” says Michel Sidibé, executive director of UNAIDS. “We hope that other countries that still have travel restrictions will remove them at the earliest.”

The US rule change comes into force 4 January, 2010.

“Today a discriminatory travel and immigration ban has gone the way of the dinosaur and we’re glad it’s finally extinct. It sure took too long to get here,” said Senator John Kerry on Friday.

Image: Obama on Friday / White House

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 02, 2009
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The UK government has told its independent advisor on drug abuse to resign after he again called for a more scientific approach to drugs.

David Nutt, until now chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), delivered a lecture at King’s College London in July, an edited version of which was published earlier this week reiterating his views on the relative safety of different drugs [Corrected 02/11]. We noted at the time that he “looks set for another row with politicians who continue to ignore researchers’ advice over illegal substances”.

In his lecture he said, “Using the [Misuse of Drugs] Act in a political way to give messages other than those relating to relative harms undermines the Act and does great damage to the educational message. We also have to fully endorse harm reduction approaches at all levels and especially stop the artificial separation of alcohol and tobacco as ‘non-drugs’.” (PDF.)

Nutt had earlier riled a previous home secretary, Jacqui Smith, with his comments regarding the dangers of MDMA (‘ecstasy’), comparing the risks of the drug to horse-riding and calling for a wider debate on society’s approach to risk.

Today Alan Johnson, the current UK Home Secretary, told Nutt to resign.

“In a letter he [Johnson] expressed surprise and disappointment over Professor Nutt's comments which damage efforts to give the public clear messages about the dangers of drugs,” said a Home Office spokesperson. “As chair of the council his actions undermine its role and scientific independence. … [T]he clear role of the chair of the ACMD is to provide independent scientific advice and not to lobby for changes in policy.”

However the sacking of Nutt has already generated a furious response from other UK politicians.

Evan Harris, a Liberal Democrat MP and member of Parliament’s Science and Technology Select Committee, said, “The political sacking of a distinguished scientist, who is the chair of an independent scientific advisory committee, for the ‘crime’ of having different views than the Secretary of State is an enormous blow to the credibility of the Government’s approach to scientific evidence.”

Harris cites a recent response from the government to a committee inquiry on evidence based policy which stated:

The Government agrees that the independence of science advisers is critical. It was precisely for this reason that the GCSA [Government Chief Scientific Adviser] wrote to then-Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to express concern over her criticism, in Parliament, of Professor Nutt (Chairman of ACMD) with regard to an article he published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Phil Willis, the chairman of the Science and Technology committee, said, “As Chair of the Science and Technology committee I am writing immediately to the Home Secretary to ask for clarification as to why the distinguished scientist David Nutt has been removed of duties as Chair of Advisory Council on Misuse of Drugs at a time when independent scientific advice to government is essential. It is disturbing if an independent scientist should be removed for reporting sound scientific advice.”

UPDATE - Read Nature's interview with Nutt here: Sacked science adviser speaks out
Richard Garside, director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies where Nutt gave his lecture in July, has written to the Home Secretary. His letter, distributed by the Science Media Centre, is copied below.

Image: University of Bristol

Continue reading "Government sacks independent drugs advisor" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 30, 2009
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The conventional wisdom these days is that governments should put more money into science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education. But a new study suggests that better education does not more scientists make.

The research was led by B. Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University in Washington, DC and Harold Salzmann of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. It analyzed several longitudinal data sets to determine how many students were staying in STEM fields between secondary school, college and their careers.

Generally, it's thought that poor incentives have caused many students to leave these fields in recent years, but Lowell et al. found quite the opposite. The number of secondary school students who went on to study STEM fields was relatively unchanged between 1972-1977 and 2000-2005. And students who stayed in STEM fields in college were actually more likely to go on to careers in research in the 1997-2000 time frame than they were in 1977-1980.

But it wasn't all good news. The study found that the most talented STEM students were actually less likely to stay in science throughout their career.

The study's conclusion? Just because you put more money into educating science students doesn't mean you'll end up with more scientists. In fact forces in the job market might be more important. The authors cite anecdotal evidence that suggests many top science students are being lured into other more lucrative careers. The inference here, I suppose, is that governments should think about incentives for retaining working scientists, in addition to worrying about getting young people into STEM fields.

The study's evidence is interesting though not definitive. Nevertheless, it's an intriguing counterpoint to the chorus calling for ever more education in the sciences. There's a raging discussion about it all over on Slashdot.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on October 29, 2009
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Earlier this month it looked like the UK government had abandoned plans to keep the DNA of innocent people on its massive police database.

The European Court of Human Rights has already said that data on innocent people should not be retained. Now, however, leaked emails indicate that the government will try to keep hold of their DNA for six years, says the Daily Mail. The previously abandoned position of the government was to keep DNA of innocents for 12 years (see: UK won't be able to store DNA data – 20 October, 2009).

It was also reported today that the profiles of 5.5 million people – over 10% of the population of England and Wales – are now on the database (Daily Telegraph). In addition, over 90,000 innocent people have had their DNA added to the database since that European Court ruling that this shouldn’t be happening (Guardian).

The UK government’s approach seems to be catching on too: the University of Akron in the US is now apparently requiring job applicants to be willing to supply a DNA sample (Inside Higher Ed).

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 29, 2009
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The head of the UK government’s independent drug advice group looks set for another row with politicians who continue to ignore researchers’ advice over illegal substances.

Earlier this year the UK’s Home Secretary launched an attack on David Nutt, chairman of the government’s own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs and a respected academic.

Nutt’s crime, in the eyes of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and other politicians, was to write an article in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. His article called for a wider debate on the risks of drugs and, in passing, compared the risks of MDMA (‘ecstasy’) to horse riding. (See: Ecstasy advice is a bitter pill.)

Credit to the man though, he has stuck to his guns and come back with another reasoned critique, delivered as a lecture at King’s College London. In it he reiterates his call for improving public understanding of the actual risks of drugs and again recommends a more logical classification of these.

Continue reading "UK government vs its own drugs advisor, Part II" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 29, 2009
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Posted for Rex Dalton

A US project to more precisely chart geological time scales is releasing a new initiative to educate students on deep time in order to challenge religious groups who argue life was divinely made about 10,000 years ago.

Earthtime’s program – downloadable at earth-time.org and available in DVD and CD format – explains the ages back billions of years. It includes teaching methods in math and physics to explain how researchers date sediments through atomic decay.

Sam Bowring, a geochronologist from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston and an Earthtime leader, described the educational drive last week to the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America.

“I will never forget Kirk Johnson of the Denver Museum of Science and Technology leaning into the camera, saying: ‘Go home and tell your parents the world is 4.567 billion years old’,” says Bowring.

In Denver, Colorado, and Boston, Massachusetts, Earthtime scientists have provided educational material to a total of hundreds of students and teachers. Denver scientists also conduct dialogues with students over district video networks.

In a planned next grant from the US National Science Foundation that previously has funded Earthtime with $1 million, scientists hope to expand the educational outreach.

One major Earthtime science project is to precisely date the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary about 65 million years ago, when most life forms were wiped out by a worldwide catastrophic event. Bowring, Johnson and other researchers are using sediments of the K-T boundary debris outside Denver for the more exact date.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 29, 2009
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Women scientists who applied for a new high-risk research award from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) had a lower funding success rate than their male counterparts.

The NIH last month announced the winners of more than 100 new awards totalling US$348 million over five years for outside-the-box biomedical research. The grants came in three flavours: Pioneer awards for innovative researchers at any career stage, New Innovator Awards for up-and-coming investigators, and a new category rolled out for the first time: Transformative R01 (T-R01) Awards for bold and uncertain projects.

As Nature reported last month, more than a third of Pioneer and New Innovator awards went to women, but female researchers made up only around 15% of T-R01 awardees. The question at the time was: How did this compare to the gender ratios of the applicants?

Nature has now learned the answer. According to data newly obtained from the NIH under a freedom of information request, 32% of Pioneer Award applicants and 40% of New Innovator Award applicants who listed their gender were women — on par with the gender ratios of the awardees, which were 34.5% and 39% female, respectively, for the two individual-based awards.

Women applicants fared worse, however, for the T-R01 competition, where 21% of grant hopefuls who listed their gender said they were women, yet only 9 of 59, or 15%, of the awardees were women. This difference, though not statistically significant according to Nature's chi-square test statistical analysis (Χ² = 0.99, p = 0.32), does not help realize the NIH's vision of developing "opportunities and programs to support recruitment, retention, re-entry, and advancement of girls and women in biomedical careers".

The NIH is now requesting applications for the 2010 T-R01s.

Image: NIH

Posted by Elie Dolgin on October 29, 2009
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Posted on behalf of Rex Dalton

A delegation of US scientists met with Cuban counterparts in Havana this week to open a broad dialogue on new era of scientific exchange.

The group visit was initiated by the Environmental Defense Fund in Washington, DC, which has special permits from the US government for interactions with Cuba. Scientists from Mexico, a long-time intermediary on US-Cuba relations, also participated.

About 30 US scientists and environmental officials held talks with the Cubans on 26-27 October in advance of an international meeting on ocean science issues. This week’s conference includes the 13th Latin American Congress on Marine Sciences – where human impact on coastal zones, biodiversity and weather hazards will be among topics discussed.

"This is a logical, low-risk area in which to begin discussions with Cuba. It is without question in our mutual interest to share science and ideas on our shared resources like the Gulf of Mexico," Environmental Defense Fund senior attorney Dan Whittle told Reuters.

Under the administration of President Barack Obama, there has been considerable thawing in relations between the two nations (Nature). Travel restrictions are being relaxed, and there is substantial movement toward breaking the long-standing US trade embargo with Cuba.

Other non-governmental organizations also are seeking to take advantage of the new political climate to try to increase scientific exchange. The New America Foundation and the American Association for Advancement of Science, both of Washington, DC, are organizing scientific exchange visits, with one expected in near future.

Posted by Alex Witze on October 28, 2009
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Immediate action should be taken to prevent plutonium leaks following a potential future earthquake at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US, Energy Secretary Steven Chu was warned this week.

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board says an earthquake could trigger a fire inside high-risk gloveboxes where work on plutonium takes place. Los Alamos sits on a fault line, so an earthquake would not be unexpected.

The consequences of an earthquake-induced fire in the lab’s plutonium facility exceed the Department of Energy’s guidelines by over two orders of magnitude, says the board.

“The board believes this situation warrants immediate attention and action,” states a letter to Chu dated 26 October (pdf).

According to the Project on Government Oversight, the energy department has been trying to delay the board’s report in order to deal with the problem before it became public. It claims that a glovebox fire could cause the public to be exposed to 100 times the recommended safe level of plutonium.

In a statement to AP and the LA Times, the lab said it was already taking action to improve fire safety at the Technical Area-55 facility.

“Protecting the health and safety of our employees, the public and the environment while conducting operations all across the laboratory, particularly at the plutonium facility, TA-55, is our primary concern,” it says.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 28, 2009
Categories: Energy, Physics & Mathematics, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Months after the House of Representatives passed its historic global warming legislation, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is finally poised to begin moving its own bill. But first, three days of non-stop testimony from dozens of experts representing the Obama administration, academics, environmental groups and business representatives.

Today was reserved for Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat who partnered up with California Democrat and committee chairwoman Barbara Boxer, to write the bill, as well as a suite of administration officials led by Energy Secretary Steven Chu and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.

Despite a steady stream of testimony underscoring the many benefits that could flow from 900-plus page bill, the debate seems to be stuck on basic questions about whether protecting the climate by deploying clean energy will bankrupt the nation. As the New York Times points out, even Democrats who come from energy producing states have reservations.

Chu tried to address the question by pointing out that China "has already made its choice" and is now spending $9 billion per month on clean energy. He went on to talk about how the United States has lost its lead in clean energy manufacturing and must now make up for lost time if it wants to remain competitive.

"When the starting gun sounded on the clean energy race, the United States stumbled," he said in his written testimony, available here. "But I remain confident that we can make up the ground."

Continue reading "US Senate begins climate proceedings " »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on October 27, 2009
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Basic research at the US Department of Homeland Security has come a long way since 2002, but disturbing flaws still exist, according to testimony at a House of Representatives hearing today.

The DHS's science and technology directorate, charged with developing gadgets for detecting explosives, dangerous persons, and chemical and biological weapons, has not performed a comprehensive risk assessment of threats, criticized David Wu, who chairs the subcommittee overseeing the directorate for the House Committee on Science and Technology, in his opening statement. As a result, it lacks a proper foundation for determining research priorities.

This is an "area of great concern that has yet to be addressed by the directorate", despite repeated requests by the subcommittee, Wu said.

But Wu also commended the S&T directorate on its progress. The directorate got off to a rocky start, and has been moving in the right direction — recently allocating 20% of its budget to basic research, for example.

Continue reading "Security science still struggling" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen on October 27, 2009
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Direct-to-consumer genetic testing can count one more consumer — the director of the US National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins.

Collins announced today at a personalized medicine colloquium in Washington DC that he spat into a set of tubes and sent off his genetic material under a pseudonym to three of the leading personal genetic testing companies. He said that all the companies provided highly accurate genotyping, but with substantial differences in the information that was revealed and the interpretations provided — similar to the conclusions reached by Collins's former human genome sequencing rival, Craig Venter, in a recent opinion article in Nature.

On a more personal level, Collins discovered that he carries two copies of the most common risk factor of type II diabetes. Collins, whose laboratory investigates the underlying genetic basis of adult-onset diabetes, said he was "surprised" by these findings since his family has no history of the disease. Upon learning the test results, Collins got off his Harley-Davidson and instigated a regular exercise regime. The svelter NIH director said he has now lost 20 pounds.

Official NIH photos from before and after Collins became director. Check out those gaunt cheeks!

Posted by Elie Dolgin on October 26, 2009
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There could not have been a more receptive audience for US President Barack Obama than the one that filled MIT’s 1100-seat Kresge auditorium to capacity today. Obama’s 19- minute speech about clean energy was filled with words that would make any American engineer or scientist’s heart -- a Democratic heart, at least -- swell with pride. He spoke of how America has always been a leader in innovation and discovery and how he believes the country’s innovators will once again forge ahead to build a new energy economy.

“From China to India, from Japan to Germany, nations everywhere are racing to develop new ways to produce and use energy. The nation that wins this competition will be the nation that leads the world economy. I’m convinced of that. And I want America to be that nation."

Continue reading "Obama’s energy speech at MIT—low in substance, high in inspiration" »

Posted by Corie Lok on October 23, 2009
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Half-a-dozen British Nobel Prize-winners have added their signatures to a petition protesting a proposal to assess basic science in part by its 'economic and social impact'.

The Research Excellence Framework, or REF, will be an important cog in the machine that doles out money to universities. The Higher Education Funding Council for England will use it to help determine which campuses receive around £2 billion a year in quality-related research funding from 2013.

Under a proposed set of changes to the REF, the council will begin basing 25% of their assessment on the research's 'economic and social impact'.

Those words undoubtedly ring true with the UK's Treasury, which is seeking some economic payback from its generous investment in research over the past decade. But it has rubbed the Nobelists the wrong way. "The REF proposals are founded on a lack of understanding of how knowledge advances," says the petition, which is on the University and College Union website.

This year's Chemistry Nobel prizewinner Venki Ramakrishnan is among the signatories. You hear his view in his own words by watching the Nature Video at the right (comments at 5:15).

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on October 22, 2009
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In what is being described as a ‘U-Turn’, the UK’s Home Office has dropped its plans to store information of innocent people on its national DNA database.

After a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights last year saying that the UK could not hold onto DNA data of innocent people. The Home Office’s response was that it would only hold onto the information for a limited time, possibly of up to 12 years.

But that decision has now been scrapped and a new version of the Policing and Crime Bill will no longer contain these proposals.

Alex Jeffreys, inventor of DNA fingerprinting has been vocal about his concerns surrounding storing people’s genetic information. But some observers are hinting that this saga is not over yet, Jeffreys may still have reason to worry. Writing on the Guardian’s website, columnist Henry Porter suggests that the bill, including the provision for storing DNA data, will return in a future parliamentary session.

But for now human rights activists are claiming victory. Liberty, a human rights organisation, says that the retreat is “sensible and tactical”. “Stockpiling the intimate details of millions of innocents is bad enough without ducking public and parliamentary scrutiny by sneaking regulations in by the back door,” says Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty.

Image: Getty

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on October 20, 2009
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Journal publishers stand accused of using open access to line their coffers this week.

The UK’s leading medical research charity has told publishers they should deal with concerns that they are taking money to make articles open access without reducing their subscription fees. In effect the allegation is publishers are having their cake and eating it and then eating someone else’s cake too.

“We would like to see a commitment from publishers to show the uptake of their open access option and to adjust their subscription rates to reflect increases in income from open access fees,” says Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust.

“Some publishers, for example Oxford University Press, have already done this and we would like to see all publishers behave the same way.”

So how big a problem is this ‘double dipping’? Is it even a problem?

Continue reading "Open access: are publishers ‘double dipping’?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 20, 2009
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posted on behalf of Geoff Brumfiel

A prominent scientist who led a mission to find water on the Moon has been arrested on charges of espionage by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Stewart Nozette, a 52-year-old former government physicist, allegedly tried to sell details of US missile detection satellites in exchange for cash. Nozette's worked for pretty much every military shop in the US government including the Air Force's Phillips Laboratory, the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Naval Research Laboratory, and the Defense Advanced Research Project's Administration (DARPA). He also served on president George H. W. Bush's space council and worked with NASA.

He's well known in scientific circles for conceiving the 1994 Clementine mission, which used a military test satellite to discover some of the first traces of water on the Moon's South Pole. More recently, he has been a co-investigator on Chandrayaan-1, the Indian Moon mission, and on an instrument aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

This isn't the first time Nozette has been in trouble with the government. According to press reports, a small non-profit Nozette ran came under investigation by NASA in 2006 for misusing funds to pay for utilities, three mortgages and use of the La Jolla Tennis Club.

This time the charges are more serious. According to a 16th October affidavit signed by FBI agent Leslie Martell, Nozette was contacted last month by an undercover officer posing as an agent working for the Israeli Intelligence Agency, Mossad. According to transcripts reprinted in the affidavit, Nozette agreed to accept money in exchange for his past access to top secret documents.

Work for Israel was nothing new for Nozette, the affidavit says that between 1998 and 2008, an Israeli aerospace company "wholly owned by the Government of the State of Israel" paid Nozette some $225,000. "I thought I was working for you already," Nozette told the agent in a transcript reproduced in the affidavit. "I mean that's what I always thought, the [foreign company] was just a front."

In September and October, Nozette allegedly provided details of a "prototype overhead collection system" to the FBI agent in exchange for cash payments of $2,000 and $9,000 dollars. He will appear later today in United States District court for the District of Columbia to face a single charge of attempted espionage.

UPDATE - read the full story here: Moon scientist arrested on spy charges

NASA

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 20, 2009
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The editorial board of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) decided last week to publish two papers linked to academy member Lynn Margulis, a cell biologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. PNAS editor-in-chief Randy Schekman had written Margulis over "apparent selective communication of reviews" of a controversial paper by non-academy member Donald Williamson, a retired zoologist from the University of Liverpool, UK.

Williamson's paper, which was 'communicated' by Margulis under the soon-to-be-defunct 'Track I' submission route that allows academy members to handle the peer review process for their colleagues, was published online in August, but was held up from print publication last month following a report in Scientific American that cited Margulis as saying that she obtained "6 or 7" reviews before receiving the "2 or 3" positive ones that recommended acceptance. The publication of a second paper, co-authored by Margulis, was also suspended because of the controversy (see 'Row at US journal widens').

Both papers will now move forward, says PNAS managing editor Daniel Salsbury. Williamson's paper, however, will be accompanied by a letter to the editor from Gonzalo Giribet, an invertebrate zoologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Williamson's hypothesis that caterpillars arose from an accidental mating between butterflies and velvet worms "is the most stupid thing that has ever been proposed," Giribet told Nature. "It's like if I said that humans had sex with fish and then you get whales. It's nonsense. It's a non-scientific hypothesis."

Williamson, who is writing a response that will be published alongside Giribet's commentary, says that Giribet's letter "missed the point" of the study by focusing on the evolutionary relationship between insects and velvet worms, rather than the possibility of hybridization. Giribet counters that he was short on space, owing to PNAS's limit of 250 words and five references, and so he concentrated on only one of many criticisms.

The fate of a third paper, also communicated by Margulis, which was challenged by an anonymous PNAS editorial board member following acceptance by three anonymous reviewers, remains up in the air. The study's author, John Hall, a computational biologist based in New York City who is an adjunct professor in the same department as Margulis, says he is currently preparing a response to the board member's concerns about his methods used to compare gene sequences. Salsbury declined to comment on the status of Hall's paper.

Image: Velvet worm from Wikimedia Commons

Posted by Elie Dolgin on October 19, 2009
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The UK must grow GM crops to avoid food shortages in the future, a report from the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences, is expected to say (Telegraph).

The study was commission in July 2008 in response to a prediction from the United Nations that world food production would need to double by 2050 to sustain a global population expected to reach nine billion.

Previous plans to grow GM crops commercially in the UK were withdrawn at the beginning of the decade after protests from green groups and consumers’ rejection of the technology.

The Telegraph says that the report, which is due to be published this week, examines several options to increase crops yields in the UK and around the world, including growing GM crops.

A source told the Sunday Telegraph, “The report will say the right GM crops should be used in the future to alleviate food shortages. This study is going to move the debate forward. The government will have to take notice of this.”

But opponents of GM crops told the Telegraph, “There is no scientific evidence that GM produces huge yields.”

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on October 19, 2009
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Research ministers from across Europe spent the last day and a half discussing how best to organise themselves so they can have more effective discussions. While this may seem like procrastination, it’s actually no small task when you are trying to forge out a path that is agreeable to 27 countries and the European Commission.

One of the main talked about issues was how to reform the scientific and technical research committee (CREST), a body through which member states advise the Europe Commission in its development of research policy proposals. Currently, a member of the Commission chairs the group. But the member states would like to be in the drivering seat so that they can take more ownership over the direction that EU research policy develops. After some wrangling with the Commission, a compromise was settled upon where both the Commission and the member states would chair the body. The research ministers were sanguine that their attempt at simplifying and giving more direction to their discussions would not in fact make things more complicated.

Continue reading "Talking shop" »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on October 16, 2009
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I was at the newly formed House of Commons Science and Technology Committee meeting yesterday for the inaugural hearing. It was a pretty wide-ranging discussion, and I have to admit that my eyes started to glaze over a bit as they sometimes do at these hearings.

But then I heard the letters S-T-F-C and my ears perked up. STFC stands for Science and Technologies Facilities Council, which is the UK's main funder for particle physics and astronomy. The STFC also administers some of the most important user facilities in Europe, such as the Diamond light source and the ISIS neutron source, both at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire.

It was the MP from Oxfordshire, Evan Harris, who was asking some tough questions about the STFC's funding situation to Paul Drayson, the minister of state for science and innovation. Harris wanted to know why Diamond and ISIS were cutting back their operating times this year.

"The issue relating to STFC is a difficult one," Drayson told him. One issue Harris quickly focused on was the exchange rate. The weakness of the pound against the euro means that STFC basically has to pay more for physicists to participate in the Large Hadron Collider and astronomers to use the giant telescopes of the European Southern Observatory.

But Drayson told the committee that the STFC had been compensated for the currency exchange rates for the past two years. "If it's not exchange rates that's causing the pressure, then it must be the flat cash allocation," Harris said. Drayson denied that too.

"Do you accept that there are pressures that are not fully met in the budget?" an obviously frustrated Harris asked Drayson.

"Um… no…," the minister replied.

So what is the problem?

"This particular research council has projects where the budgets of these projects are getting significantly over spent," Drayson finally said.

Drayson didn't elaborate further at the time, but I collared him after the meeting to ask which projects he meant. "The ITER project is putting huge pressure overall," he said.

ITER of course, is the massive fusion project in the south of France. By coincidence I just did a story about how the Europeans hope to pay for it. You can read it here (with a subscription).

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on October 15, 2009
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The French public prosecutor and the police's white collar crime squad have opened a preliminary investigation of 17 charities, including several medical research charities, and humanitarian ones, the newspaper Le Parisien revealed yesterday. Under the French judicial system this is an information gathering probe, and no formal investigation of the charities or any individuals has been made.

The medical charities include one working on diabetes, another on age-related macular degeneration, two on Alzheimer's disease, and two on cancer. A key question investigators will be addressing is what proportion of the millions of euros collected by the charities was spent on their stated charitable aims. Perhaps complicating the investigation, it's reported that several of the charities are French nodes of ones based in the United States, or of international networks.

The France charity scene was rocked in the 1990's by the discovery of a major financial fraud in the country's biggest medical charity, L'Association pour la Recherche contre le Cancer, which resulted in the late Jacques Crozemarie, it's president being sentenced in 2000 to four years imprisonment, along with paying heavy fines, and damages to the charity. Researchers associated with the charity, including beneficiaries of its research funding, came under fire at the time for having turned a blind eye to longstanding rumours of wrongdoing at the charity.

Posted by Declan Butler on October 15, 2009
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Plans for a new multi-million pound science park in the UK were unveiled earlier this week by the UK government, the Wellcome Trust and GlaxoSmithKline.

The park, which will be located at GSK’s existing site in Stevenage, could eventually serve as a base for 1,500 scientists working for early-stage biotech companies.

“It will leverage our existing strengths as a world leader in the sector, helping it to grow and reinforcing our international competitiveness,” said UK business secretary Lord Mandelson (press release). “And ultimately it will help us build towards a stronger UK economy coming out of the global downturn.”

Initial funding for the park comes from the government (£16.7m), The Wellcome Trust (£6m), the East of England Development Agency (£4m) and GSK (£11m). The Daily Telegraph says the park could eventually cost £170m.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 15, 2009
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Researchers have long noted that journals’ conflict-of-interest reporting requirements can be bewilderingly various, and commensurately confusing and time-consuming to comply with.

Thye need worry no more when they submit their manuscripts -- at least if they are submitting to the gang of 12 journals belonging to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. In simultaneous editorials like this one in the New England Journal of Medicine, those journals are announcing their adoption of a new, uniform format for financial interest reporting by manuscript authors. You can take a look at the form they are requiring authors to complete here; and a sample of a form completed by Kermit the Frog (no kidding) is available here. It should be noted that Kermit, while required to describe qualitatively his financial ties, was not obliged to spell out the dollar amounts he collected.

The editors say that, for the next six months, the form will be in a beta-testing stage; they will meet again to tweak it according to comments they get from users between now and 10 April 2010.

Meantime, a new group of specialists have captured the limelight for the anemic rate at which they reported their conflicts at their 2008 annual meeting. This study, published last week in NEJM, reported that just 71.2% of speakers who received payments from five makers of total hip and knee prostheses in 2007 told their audience at the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons meeting that they had received those payments.

Posted by Alex Witze on October 13, 2009
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By Geoff Brumfiel and Declan Butler

The arrest by French police last Thursday of a particle physicist on allegations that he has links with Al Qaida has generated some potentially misleading statements and headlines.

Although French police have not officially released a name, the suspect is widely reported to be Adlène Hicheur, a 32-year-old physicist from the Swiss Federal Technical Institute de Lausanne (EPFL), who since 2003 had worked at LHC beauty (LHCb), one of four major particle experiments at CERN. According to French law Hicheur will be charged later today.

But wait? Did we hear the word "nuclear" and "al-Qaeda"? Cue the press. Coverage has been wide and varied, but for the best of the best, you have to the UK:

He's the “AL QAEDA-LINK NUCLEAR EXPERT,“ according to the Daily Express .

Well from what we can see, he appeared to specialize in the alignment of particle detectors and the complex theoretical physics surrounding the B-quark. That makes him kind of a subatomic expert, really.

The Daily Mail threw nuclear fusion into the mix, saying that “MI5 had been warned that the suspects are outstanding scientists who had been honing their techniques in nuclear fusion across the world.”

Again, we're a bit perplexed. Surely if al-Qaeda wanted to "hone their techniques" in nuclear fusion they could have sent their "nuclear expert" to ITER, the giant fusion experiment in the South of France.

But the prize goes to the Express, which boldly belted out the headline: AL-QAEDA SCIENTIST HELD AT NUCLEAR BASE

That makes CERN sound like some sort of criminal lair located beneath Antarctica (he wasn't arrested at CERN, by the way).

Honorable mention to the Daily Star for just running a picture of Tom Hanks and bigging up the Angels and Demons reference.

In a weird sort of way, that could be the most accurate angle on the story--LHCb is hoping to understand the imbalance between matter and antimatter in the Universe. But they're not, so far as we're aware, trying to use this knowledge to destroy the Vatican.

To be fair, a lot of the UK press didn't go quite so over the top. The Guardian and the Times had pretty reasonable coverage (although he was a physicist, not an engineer).

Credit: CERN

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on October 12, 2009
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Lidia Brito is set to be the new head of science policy at UNESCO, according to SciDevNet. Brito, Mozambique’s former science minister, will take up the post in December, it says.

“She is well known as a knowledgeable and passionate advocate for science-based development in poor countries,” Mohamed Hassan, executive director of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, told the website. “We can think of no better person to build on UNESCO’s recent efforts to develop capacity in science policy in the developing world and especially in Africa.”

Brito follows Irina Bokova who was elected director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in September.

Both Bokova and Brito have a lot of work to do. As Nature noted in a 24 September editorial, little has changed since a damming 2007 report on the agency’s science portfolio which labelled it “fragmented, over-ambitious, unfocused” and lacking a clear vision.

As the editorial said:

The history and culture of UNESCO do not bode well for serious change. But business as usual is not an option if UNESCO is to have a scientific raison d'être.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 12, 2009
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Harvard University in the US has retained its title as the world’s top academic powerhouse for the sixth year running, in a ranking of the top 200 universities in the world. But in the Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings, published on 8 October, Yale University slipped to third place, being overtaken by the UK’s University of Cambridge.

The UK claimed four of the top six spots, with University College London moving up from 7th place in 2008 to 4th this year. The University of Oxford and Imperial College London jointly took fifth place. US universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in ninth place, fill the next ten places.

The best performing university outside the US and UK was the Australian National University, which dropped one place to 17th from last year.

Continue reading "US still dominates university rankings" »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on October 09, 2009
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Developing countries have more than doubled spending on science over a 5 year period, from US$134 billion in 2002 and to US$272 billion in 2007, new figures show.

The number of researchers in developing nations jumped from 1.8 million to 2.7 million over the same time period, according to data release from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) on 6 October. During the same period, the number of researchers in developed countries increased by only 8.6% to 4.4 million.

Continue reading "Science spending up in developing countries" »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on October 08, 2009
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Those from the most privileged backgrounds have come to dominate British science and will continue to do so, according to new report.

Researchers from the Sutton Trust, which campaigns for educational equality, analysed the school and university backgrounds of 1,700 fellows of the Royal Society and the British Academy. They found 42% of them were educated in private schools.

“This report is yet more evidence of the uneven life chances in Britain,” says Peter Lampl, chairman of the trust (press release). “Students from the independent sector, which educates just seven percent of children, are substantially more likely to reach the top of our most coveted professions and succeed in influential walks of life.”

A small number of elite individual schools are also overrepresented, with list of schools contributing the most fellows having the recognisable names of Eton, Winchester, and St Paul’s at the top. The report also found that of those educated in the UK, 68% of British Academy fellows and 47% of Royal Society fellows went of either Oxford or Cambridge university.

Continue reading "Privately educated dominate UK science" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 08, 2009
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The European Commission has proposed investing an additional €50 billion into a new research and development programme for low-carbon energy over the next decade, ramping up annual investments from the current €3 billion to €8 billion annually.

The proposal lays out funding goals in six sectors - wind, solar, nuclear, bio-energy, electricity grids and carbon capture and storage, while creating a new "Smart Cities Initiative" focusing on urban energy efficiency. Solar came out on top with €16 billion, followed by CCS at €13 billion. For a quick summary of investments, check Reuters.

The plan sounds good but is missing one thing: Money. The commission readily acknowledges that it can't foot the entire bill itself, meaning "public and private sectors at national and EU level" will need to step up to make it a reality. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal reports EU Commissioner Janez Potocnik saying that most of the money will need to come from the private sector.

Response to the plan has generally been positive, despite some questions about priorities. The European Wind Energy Association wonders why CCS and nuclear received more money than wind, which is ready to go. Along similar lines, the European Photovoltaic Industry Association suggests the commission would be wise to put more resources into clean energy deployment.

Policymakers, researchers and business representatives will discuss the proposal later this month at the European Energy Technology Summit in Stockholm.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on October 07, 2009
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The American scientific elite found itself in a rare place this afternoon: the White House.

Hours before a high-stakes meeting on the US stance in Afghanistan and Pakistan, President Barack Obama took a little break by handing out this year's crop of National Medals of Science and National Medals of Technology and Innovation. In a packed ceremony in the White House's East Room, with cabinet secretaries including Kathleen Sebelius (health), Steve Chu (energy), and Gary Locke (commerce) looking on, Obama seemed to enjoy riffing on the joys of science. (Plus an obligatory opening joke about how his daughter Sasha has a science fair coming up, "and I was thinking that you guys could give us a few tips".)

"We see the promise -- not just for our economy but for our health and well-being -- in the human capacity for creativity and ingenuity," he told the audience, which included presidential science advisor John Holdren and National Academy of Sciences president Ralph Cicerone. "And we are reminded of the power of free and open inquiry, which is not only at the heart of all of your work, but at the heart of this experiment we call America."

Two of the awardees shared what might even be interpreted as warm glances at each other before receiving their medals from Obama. Francis Collins and J. Craig Venter, once heads of the competing teams in the race to sequence the human genome, both now have identical gold medals on red, white and blue ribbons. Collins, of course, is the recently appointed director of the National Institutes of Health (see Nature Q&A with him here), an agency that marked a sad moment today with the news of the death of Ruth Kirschstein, who served as the first female head of an NIH institute when she assumed directorship of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences in 1974.

The other winners of this year's science medals are:

Berni Alder, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Joanna Fowler, Brookhaven National Laboratory
Elaine Fuchs, The Rockefeller University
James Gunn, Princeton University
Rudolf Kalman, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich
Michael Posner, University of Oregon
JoAnne Stubbe, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Next up on the Obama Science Fair Tour: a star party on the White House's south lawn tonight.

Image: Collins, seated at far left, while Venter waits to receive his medal

Posted by Alex Witze on October 07, 2009
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It is sometimes said in academic circles that you’re not a proper researcher until you’ve got your first rejection letter from Nature or Science. But does it really make sense to submit your paper to the most highly cited journals and work your way down?

Martin Heintzelman and Diego Nocetti, two economists at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, aimed to find out. Their latest paper in the B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy is entitled “Where Should we Submit our Manuscript?”

“The journal submission process is a controversial and stressful part of academia. There are many dimensions of uncertainty, and bad decisions could greatly delay publication of important results and harm one’s career,” they write.

They constructed models of increasing complexity, starting with just the journal’s characteristics (fees, time taken to decide) and the impatience of the author and moving on to include factors such as the quality of the manuscript, flaws in the reviewing process and how impatient authors are to get their work published in economics journals.

Applying mathematics to this question proves common sense correct: “This paper provides new evidence that, on the whole, the advice supplied to young faculty members by veterans of academia is correct. Authors largely have an incentive to submit to the best journals and then subsequently, work their way down a schedule of journals.”

However, there is an exception to this: “particularly impatient or risk-averse” researchers should begin their submission ordeal further down the chain.

Finally, Heintzelman and Nocetti discuss the implications of their work for journals themselves. They conclude that the best thing for journals to do would be to review papers faster and charge higher submission fees. This would reduce the impact of time lags on impatient authors and reduce the number of lower-quality paper submissions trying their luck with an imperfect reviewing system.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 07, 2009
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The UK’s Conservative party has appointed James Dyson as their technology tsar.

Speaking at the party’s annual conference in Manchester, Dyson called for more support for science, via avenues such as tax breaks for high tech industry. He also called for education, saying Britain had 58,000 engineering vacancies but produced only 20,000 engineering graduates a year.

“More than ever, we need to value our scientists and engineers. Our future wealth depends on it,” said Dyson (Guardian).

In a suggestion that may not go down well in the financial services sector – where employees are traditionally viewed as Conservative voters – he added that the UK could “make money from money – or money from making things” (Daily Telegraph).

Dyson will be heading up a taskforce aiming to see how Britain can be made a high-tech exporter. UK policy addict and founder of Research Fortnight William Cullerne Bown posts this joke (although he claims not to be its originator):

re Dyson Review - how much is he going to Hoover up?

As the Guardian notes, self-styled champion of engineering Dyson has already had to admit that his high tech products are actually manufactured overseas. But the R&D, patents, and profits remain British, says the Guardian.

Dyson is most famous for inventing a widely used bag-less vacuum cleaner and his appointment sets up an intriguing clash with Amstrad founder and Labour ‘enterprise tsar’ Alan Sugar.

There’s only one route left for the UK’s third party, the Liberal Democrats: hire Clive Sinclair, and quickly!

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 06, 2009
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Animal-human hybrid embryo research has been “driven out of Britain”, according to the front page of today’s Independent. However, one of the scientists involved has already cast doubt on the paper’s story.

The paper claims that “all research involving the controversial creation of animal-human ‘hybrid’ embryos has been refused funding in Britain”. It also says that “every one of the three projects to develop embryonic stem cells from cloned embryos created by fusing human cells with animal eggs has now been abandoned”.

Earlier this year the UK bodies responsible for funding (or not funding) such research were forced to deny that moral objections played a part in the rejection of funding applications (see: Moral objections to hybrid embryo research claims rejected).

The three holders of licences for animal-human hybrids in the UK were Stephen Minger, Lyle Armstrong, and Justin St John.

Minger recently departed King’s College London to work in industry (see: Top scientist’s industry move heralds stem-cell shift). When this issue reared its head earlier this year Minger claimed he was misinterpreted by the Independent, which claimed he suggested moral factors were an issue in funding rejections.

Armstrong, says the Independent, has departed Newcastle University for Spain (although no-one at the university’s Institute for Human Genetics was immediately available to confirm this).

Finally, and the apparent trigger for the story, Justin St John is leaving the UK for Australia. In a statement distributed by the Science Media Centre, St John says:

The MRC [Medical Research Council] funded me to make mouse-pig hybrids and I am grateful to them for their support for my work. Hybrid work will continue in the UK. However my hybrid work was a spin off from my main research interest which I will be pursuing at Monash [University in Australia].

Both the Medical Research Council and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council also released statements defending their use of peer-review as the best way to approve or reject grant applications. “Having a HFEA licence and legislative approval to conduct certain research does not give an area special treatment,” said Colin Miles, BBSRC’s Head of Integrative and Systems Biology.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 05, 2009
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Produced by Evidence for the government, the performance report compares papers and citations for UK researchers with other players, such as the USA, Germany, Japan and China.

“Once again, we have outperformed other nations in the G8 and secured our position as second in the world in scientific productivity,” says UK science minister Lord Drayson (press release).

While UK output fell to 7.9% of world papers, down from 9.3% in 1999, citations rose very slightly to 11.8% in 2008. Only the USA did better in citations for clinical, health, biological, environmental, and social sciences. In mathematics Germany pipped Blighty to second while China nosed ahead in engineering. Physical scientists need to pull their socks up though: you’re in fifth, behind Germany, China, Japan and the research behemoth that is the USA.

As ever, a picture is worth a thousand blog posts, so below the fold are the ‘research footprints’ for various nations in 2008 (previous figures for comparison can be found in the previous report).

Continue reading "Research footprints of the G8" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 02, 2009
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The journal Transport today retracted a 2006 paper co-authored by Hamid Behbahani, Iran's transport minister, and two other scientists. In a news article published yesterday, Nature had drawn attention to the fact that the paper ("Providing a decreasing congestion probability model for urban streets network") contained large amounts of text identical with that of three earlier articles by other researchers. The retraction statement can be found here.
In a response yesterday that was attributed to Behbahani, he defended the article --- see statement (in Persian) on the Iranian news site Alef.ir.

As also reported by Nature yesterday, over the past week other journals have said they intend to retract, on grounds of plagiarism, three papers co-authored by Iran's science minister Kamran Daneshjou.

Posted by Declan Butler on October 01, 2009
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Posted on behalf of Meredith Wadman

Seven months after signing into law $10.4 billion in economic stimulus funding for the National Institutes of Health, President Barack Obama visited the Bethesda-based biomedical agency today to announce that...$5 billion of the money has been spent.

Coming as it did on the last day of the government’s 2009 fiscal year, this “major Recovery Act announcement,” as billed by the White House, was in fact considerable testimony to the speed with which the huge agency can shovel money out the door when the pressure is on. After all, only nine days ago, according to the calculations of Patrick Clemins at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a mere $2.67 billion of the windfall had been spent. (All of it needs to be disbursed by one year from today, when the government’s 2010 fiscal year ends.)

The president was received with great enthusiasm by a crowd of several hundred gathered in a packed auditorium at NIH’s Clinical Center, many of whom (this reporter included) had waited 2.5 hours to hear a 15-minute speech in which Obama proclaimed the stimulus funds “the single largest boost to biomedical research in history.”

Continue reading "Obama visits Bethesda for stimulus announcement" »

Posted by Alex Witze on September 30, 2009
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Two more journals, Springer's Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology and the Taiwanese Journal of Mechanics, have told Nature that they intend to retract, on grounds of plagiarism, papers co-authored by Iran's science and education minister Kamran Daneshjou, a professor in the school of mechanical engineering at the Iran University of Science & Technology (IUST) in Tehran, and his colleague. This follows an investigation by Nature published online this afternoon.

Springer had already indicated last week that they would retract another paper by the same coauthors after Nature drew attention to duplications of the text and figures from an earlier paper by Korean researchers.

Before being appointed science minister in early September, Daneshjou was also head of the interior ministry office overseeing the disputed presidential elections in June that kept Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power. This week's story in Nature also calls into question a paper coauthored by Hamid Behbahani, Iran's transport minister.

Meanwhile, visits by Daneshjou to Tehran University on Monday, and Sharif University yesterday, for the start of the academic year, were met with protests by students. Radio Free Europe reported:

"The student said classmates brandished copies of "Nature" magazine, the publication that recently highlighted apparent plagiarism in an article coauthored by Daneshjou. Chants rang out of "Daneshjou the Liar, where are your articles?"

Posted by Declan Butler on September 30, 2009
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As the 2009 fiscal year comes to a close, the new director of the AAAS R&D budget and policy programme, Patrick Clemins, has put up a timely analysis of how three major science agencies -- DOE, NIH and NSF -- are doing spending the billions they were given in the Recovery Act funding associated with February's economic stimulus package.

Clemins identifies that, of $32.7 billion given to the DOE for everything from weatherization grants to 'smart grid' investment, the agency has only spent $11.2 billion. Within the DOE's office of science, however, the spending is almost complete: $1.3 billion of $1.6 billion has been spent.

At the NIH, $2.7 billion of $10.4 billion has been spent, while the NSF has spent $2.2 billion of its $3 billion in stimulus funding. The NSF seems faster than the NIH, Clemins says, because the NIH made the decision to spread the funding out over two fiscal years, 2009-2010, while the NSF was aiming to finish in one. "They [the NIH] are actually on schedule even though they appear behind the rest of them," says Clemins, who adds that another reason why the NIH is behind in spending is because it established more new grant programmes -- something that takes time -- while the NSF spent most of its money by simply increasing success rates for existing grant programmes.

Posted by Eric Hand on September 29, 2009
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German science is already feeling the impact of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s victory in the Sunday’s general election.

Merkel is abandoning her previous ‘grand coalition’ with the left-leaning Social Democratic Party and will instead form a government with the more right-of-centre Free Democratic Party.

Nature’s Quirin Schiermeier predicted on 23 September that a new coalition with the FDP could be on the cards, and noted it’s implications for German research:

[The Free Democrats] have a distinctly liberal approach in hot-button areas such as genetically modified crops and stem cells. … If the Free Democrats, led by Guido Westerwelle, succeed in becoming the new coalition partner, they may use their influence to reduce red tape and restrictions in ethically sensitive branches of science.

"The economic situation won't allow excessive increases in science budgets," says Ulrike Flach, the party's spokeswoman for science and technology. "But we are set to increase the general freedom to research, and ease existing restrictions to stem-cell research and genetic engineering."

Chancellor Merkel is a chemist by training, and her reign has been generally seen as pro-science.

Her re-election is already being credited with moving certain science-related markets. The expectation that the new government will back nuclear power and abandon plans to close many reactors sent utility company stocks up today. In contrast, solar power companies fell amid speculation that incentives for renewables could be cut.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 28, 2009
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The Shrine of Fatima-al-Massumeh, not an enrichment facility

If you find yourself traveling through central Iran, you might want to visit the historic city of Qom. While you're there you should check out the Mar'ashi Najafi Library, with over 500,000 handwritten texts; the Shrine of Fatima-al-Massumeh, one of the holy sites of Shi'a Islam; and of course the Namak Lake, a large salt lake just 100km outside the city.

Or you could skip all that and go see Iran's super-secret underground enrichment plant, which Western intelligence officials believe is located somewhere nearby. America, France and Britain outted the facility today at the opening of the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. According to the New York Times, the plant has room for a cascade of around 3,000 gas centrifuges of the type used to enrich uranium for fuel, or nuclear weapons.

Technically, as a signatory to the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran has the right to enrich uranium for use in nuclear power plants. That is what it's claimed to be doing with its main enrichment facility at Natanz, ever since an opposition group exposed its existence in 2002.

But the new facility is both undeclared to the international community and perhaps too small to be very useful as a fuel fabrication plant. "The size and configuration of this facility is inconsistent with a peaceful program," President Obama said in a brief statement. Obama, together with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French Prime Minister Nicholas Sarkozy, condemned the plant, the existence of which emerged just a day after the UN Security Council passed a resolution calling for tough action against those who violate the NPT.

Iran's response to all this has been muted so far. In a letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the nation admitted to "a new pilot fuel enrichment plant", according to a statement from the agency. No nuclear material has yet been introduced into the facility and inspectors are seeking access as soon as possible.

Given the growing international momentum against Iran, the Islamic Republic should probably let nuclear inspectors come to Qom soon to check out all the sites ASAP.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 25, 2009
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The US Food and Drug Administration admitted yesterday that political influence led to the agency's decision last year to approve a device to repair damaged knees against the recommendation of its own scientists.

Since 2006, the FDA's scientific reviewers have twice turned down applications for the device, known as Menaflex and manufactured by ReGen Biologics of Hackensack, New Jersey, according to an FDA report. The company did not show "that patients who received the device experienced any benefit", one scientist wrote in a rejection letter. (AP)

But following persistent lobbying from four New Jersey Democratic congressmen — Senators Robert Menendez and Frank R. Lautenberg and Representatives Frank Pallone Jr and Steven R. Rothman — FDA officials overruled the scientists' advice and granted approval for the US$3,000 knee patch last December. All four legislators received significant campaign contributions from ReGen; for example, Rothman alone took in US$13,300 last year, according to OpenSecrets.org.

The director of the FDA's device division who gave the go-ahead, Daniel Schultz, resigned last month following numerous safety concerns and other scandals. (Reuters)

Continue reading "FDA's review process knee-deep in trouble" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on September 25, 2009
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A research team from an Israeli university has been thrown out of a solar power competition for being based on the West Bank.

Many in Israel have reacted with anger to the news that Ariel University Center of Samaria has been excluded from the Solar Decathalon, a competition to design solar powered housing.

Although this contest has previously been run by the US Department of Energy the Spanish housing ministry is hosting the 2010 version. The ministry says EU law prevents the West Bank-based university from participating.

“The EU does not recognise the occupation of the West Bank, which is where this university is,” said a spokesman (Guardian).

The West Bank has been occupied by Israel since 1967. The European Union has continually condemned Israel’s illegal building of settlements in the area.

Ariel University claims the decision is “an expression of an illegitimate political struggle” that “blatantly violates international law and charters regarding academic freedom” (Jerusalem Post, World Jewish Congress).

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 25, 2009
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A European court injected a fair bit of doubt and confusion into carbon markets Wednesday, ruling that the European Commission exceeded its authority when it imposed tighter caps for greenhouse gas emissions in Poland and Estonia (Reuters, The Times)

At first glance, the ruling could be interpreted to curtail the commission's authority to impose a European cap, which would threaten the integrity of the entire multi-national system and fuel existing tensions among countries. But analysts say the ruling is actually limited to the second commitment period, which runs from 2008 to 2012. The commission's authority moving forward does not appear to be in any danger, which means the impacts, whatever they turn out to be, will likely be temporary.

Milo Sjardin, an expert on carbon markets for the consultancy New Energy Finance in New York, said he isn't expecting any major changes in the overall European cap, in part because the recession has already significantly reduced pressure on European industries. NEF's latest estimates indicate that covered emissions (which include power and major industrial sources) are likely to drop by a whopping 10 percent in 2009 alone.

The result is a 50 percent reduction in the cost of curbing emissions by 20 percent by 2020. In fact, NEF now says it will be cheaper to curb emissions by 30 percent (an EU pledge that is contingent on action by the rest of the world) than original forecast for the 20 percent target, Sjardin says.

For his part, EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas made it clear that the commission isn't about to back down (AFP).

Regardless, the price of carbon allowances in Europe dropped on the news as traders weighed the possibility of the commission losing its battle and granting additional allowances, not only to Poland and Estonia but six other countries that have appealed their caps. That would make compliance easier and thus decrease the likelihood that companies would need to buy additional allowances to cover their emissions.

If all eight countries were to return to their originally proposed CAP, NEF says allowances would increase by 15 percent. And because companies can carry their allowances forward into the third trading period, which runs from 2013 to 2020, such a scenario could theoretically depress prices for years to come. That would be good news for traditional industries, although it might make clean energy technologies less competitive.

"But we regard that as a very unlikely scenario," Sjardin says. "There’s likely to be a compromise somewhere down the road."

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on September 24, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Energy, Policy, Road to Copenhagen | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The United Nations Security Council has passed a resolution from president Barack Obama that would strengthen efforts to slow the spread of nuclear weapons. Plenty in this White House statement, but the long and the short of it is that the resolution endorses strengthening the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and improving nuclear security.

It also called for "full compliance" on all Security Council resolutions relating to Iran and North Korea, two trouble states for the non-proliferation regime.

There's some reason to suspect that Obama's announcement of the withdrawal of a proposed missile defence system from Poland and the Czech Republic may have helped to aid the resolution's passage, particularly with Russia—one of the Security Council's permanent members and a long time hold out against sanctions against Iran. The New York Times quotes Russian President Dmitri Medvedev as saying:

“I told His Excellency Mr. President that we believe we need to help Iran to take a right decision,” Mr. Medvedev said, adding that “sanctions rarely lead to productive results, but in some cases, sanctions are inevitable.”

Even though the resolution is non-binding, meaning nobody's obligated to follow through, the press is already endorsing it as a diplomatic victory for Obama and for non-proliferation. A look at the times:

U.N. Security Council Adopts Measure on Nuclear Arms (NY Times)

Obama wins passage of nuclear nonproliferation resolution at U.N. (LA Times)

Barack "No Bomb" Obama pushes for world without nukes
(Times of India)

Credit: United Nations

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 24, 2009
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Today we hail the most underappreciated people in the world of research. People without whose unstinting and oft-unacknowledged effort the cogs of the science machine would surely seize up.

No, not science news reporters, but the lowly post-doc. For today is the first annual National Postdoc Appreciation Day.

“We are celebrating the significant contribution that postdoctoral scholars make to the US scientific research enterprise and, at the same time, increasing awareness of this contribution,” says the National Postdoctoral Association.

Events celebrating the contribution of post-docs are taking place across the US today. Perhaps reflecting the fact that many of these researchers live something of a hand to mouth existence, many of these events focus on offering food and career advice.

Bonus points to UCSF for having a magician at their event: “And for my next trick, I will make your dreams of tenure disappear.”

Why not join in the appreciation by telling us why you love post docs? Over on the Nature News twitter feed we’re asking you to complete this sentence:

I luv pdocs bcos…(hashtag: #luvpdocs)

And lab-managers, the correct answer is not ‘because they’re cheap’…

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 24, 2009
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Irina Bokova, Bulgaria's ambassador to France, was last night elected director general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) in the fifth and final round of voting in Paris by the 58 member states making up Unesco's executive board. She obtained 31 votes, beating Farouk Hosny, 71, Egypt's minister of culture, who won 27 votes – see press release. If, as is expected, the appointment is confirmed by the body's general conference when it meets next month Bokova, 57, would be the first woman, and the first East European, to head the agency. Hosny would have been the first from the Arab world.

Only a few weeks ago Bokova was considered a long shot for the post, with Hosny the longstanding favourite among the initial nine candidates. But Hosny's campaign was dogged in the runup to the election by allegations that he had made antisemitic comments, and concerns over Egypt's poor track record on liberty of expression.

Continue reading "Bulgaria's Bokova wins top Unesco job in photo-finish election" »

Posted by Declan Butler on September 23, 2009
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Large chunks of text, figures, and tables in a 2009 paper co-authored by Kamran Daneshjou, Iran's science minister, are identical to those of a 2002 paper published by South Korean researchers, Nature has learned. Daneshjou served as the head of the interior ministry office which ran the disputed presidential elections in June, which returned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. Daneshjou is also a former governor general of Tehran.

The paper by Daneshjou and Majid Shahravi from the department of mechanical engineering at the Iran University of Science and Technology in Tehran is entitled "Analysis of critical ricochet angle using two space discretization methods", and was published in the journal Engineering with Computers in 2009. In many places the text duplicates verbatim that of an earlier paper: "Ricochet of a tungsten heavy alloy long-rod projectile from deformable steel plates", published by South Korean scientists in the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics in 2002.

Other sentences in Daneshjou's paper are identical to those in a paper given by other researchers at a 2003 conference.

The scientific credentials of Daneshjou, who was appointed as science minister earlier this month, have been the subject of controversy, with the Los Angeles Times reporting in late August about question marks over his PhD. According to his university webpage at the time, the PhD was awarded by the 'Manchester Imperial Institute of Science and Technology.' The webpage this afternoon has changed and says that the PhD was awarded in 1989 after working at Imperial College in London, but that the defence of the thesis was held in Amirkabir University of Technology in Iran.

Update: for more, see our full news story on this.

Posted by Declan Butler on September 22, 2009
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All eyes are now on tomorrow's UN Summit on Climate Change in New York and the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh later this week, although it's not yet clear whether either of these meetings is going to produce any meaningful breakthroughs.

Indeed, if last week's US-sponsored Major Economies Forum is any indication, the outlook isn't particularly good. The meeting ended as quietly as it began, leaving the United States' top climate envoy, Todd Stern, with little to say except that there was a "narrowing of differences" among the globe's top 17 greenhouse gas emitters. Combine that with increasing skepticism that the US Senate is going to be able to squeeze a climate bill out before the UN global warming talks in Copenhagen in December, and things begin to look positively gloomy.

Nonetheless, there are signs of movement at the highest levels, which is what people at the lower levels have been saying was needed for some time. Chinese President Hu Jintao will discuss his country's climate policies during a much-anticipated address on Tuesday. US President Barack Obama plans to do the same, although it's not clear how far he will be able to go given that his hands are tied by Congress.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has announced that he would be willing to personally attend the talks in Copenhagen if it comes down to that, and The Associated Press has reported that Obama might attend as well. This would certainly qualify as an important gesture of goodwill if the US delegation is unable to sign on to any significant commitments due to slow-moving domestic politics.

And just for kicks, Conservation International reports that out that Guyana President Bharrat Jagdeo and Harrison Ford (who does not lead a country but has appeared in some cool films) will attend an "extraordinary origami event" in New York, calling for the inclusion of tropical forest conservation an eventual climate change pact. Pictures aren't yet available, but keep an eye out for "life-size origami trees and wildlife."

Continue reading "Mixed signals as 'Climate Week' kicks off" »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on September 21, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Energy, Policy, Road to Copenhagen | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Peter Chen, Vice President of Research and Corporate Relations of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, will resign from his post over data falsification concerns in his research group, ETH announced today.

Chen requested an investigation in January 2009 at the same time that he withdrew one of his organic chemistry group's spectroscopy publications, which was inconsistent with results from other groups working on the same topic, according to the ETH press release. The outside investigation board could not find a key lab notebook and did find identical background noise in purportedly independent spectra, so it "concluded that some of the data...were falsified."

The institute has not publicly accused any individuals over the falsification it uncovered, though a second paper was also retracted and a Ph.D. candidate withdrew a dissertation, before retracting the withdrawal. According to ETH President Ralph Eichler, "there is now no legal way of finding out for sure who was responsible for the falsifications."

Posted by Lucas Laursen on September 21, 2009
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Energy-efficiency researcher Arun Majumdar will, if confirmed by the US Senate, take the reins of the controversial new federal agency tasked with coming up with brilliant new insights into energy independence.

Congress allocated money to create the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) earlier this year in hopes of replicating the success of the Pentagon's own high-risk, high-return research agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Pretty much everyone in government wants a DARPA spin-off these days; there's an intelligence version too, IARPA, and some people want NASA to have one too.

But ARPA-E has both the best shot at actually producing useful breakthroughs, and the highest chance of getting mired in federal bureaucracy. In 2007, for instance, Nature columnist David Goldston pointed out that the ARPA-E approach blithely takes "the technocratic path of assuming that US energy problems are largely the result of an inadequate supply of fresh ideas. But there's ample evidence that a bigger problem is the lack of demand for new ideas in the marketplace."

Others are more optimistic. In a news release announcing Majumdar's nomination, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he works, notes that "ARPA-E’s goals are to create technologies that have the potential to reduce the nation’s reliance on foreign energy supplies, reduce energy-related greenhouse gas emissions, and improve energy efficiency."

Few would disagree that sounds like a good goal. The problem is getting there. ARPA-E has reportedly had problems filling its all-important positions of program managers, and Science's Jeffrey Mervis reported in August that researchers were griping about how the first round of grant proposals was handled.

Majumdar has held several key management positions at Berkeley Lab, including serving as associate lab director for energy and environmental sciences. If he makes it through the Senate, those management skills will surely be put to the test.

Image: LBNL

Posted by Alex Witze on September 20, 2009
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Farouk Hosny, Egypt's minister of culture and the favourite to succeed Koichiro Matsuura as director general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco), failed to win an outright majority in the first round of a secret ballot held last night at a meeting of the agency's executive board in Paris. Hosny won 22 of the 57 votes made – there was one abstention -- giving him a clear lead over other the eight other contenders, but short of the 30 votes needed for election.

Bulgaria's candidate, former foreign minister Irina Gueorguieva Bokova won eight votes, and three other candidates seven – Russia's deputy foreign minister Alexander Vladimirovich Yakovenko, Ecuador's Ivonne Juez de Baki, a diplomat, and Austria's Benita Ferrero-Waldner, European Commissioner for external relations. The remainder won no votes, or less than three.

Four further rounds of voting will be held this evening, and, if necessary, tomorrow. All nine candidates can rerun. If it goes to a third round, the two winners of this would go head-to-head in a final tiebreaker round. Unesco's general assembly must officially confirm the nomination at a meeting on 15 October.

The 71 year old Egyptian candidate has been widely considered the front-runner in the election, which is highly-political and subject to intense horsetrading. It would be the first time that a director general of Unesco came from an Arab country, and several countries are supporting his candidacy as a bridge between the West and Islamic countries. Hosny also has the united backing of the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and the African Union.

But the candidature of Hosny, a painter, and culture minister for two decades, has become steeped in controversy over allegations that he has made antisemitic comments, and criticism of Egypt's poor track record on censorship and press freedom – liberty of expression is one of Unesco's founding principles. His candidature has been opposed by Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace prize winner, and some intellectuals, as well as Jewish, and human rights groups.

Posted by Declan Butler on September 18, 2009
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Partisan bickering in Washington has so many bigger things to fight about these days – health-care reform and climate change among them – that it is sad, rather than amusing, to watch the Democrats and Republicans sparring over the notion of administration ‘czars’.

Czars are senior advisors appointed directly by the president. In most cases their appointment does not need to confirmed by the Senate, and they are not subject to Congressional oversight as directors of federal agencies would be. Their background is also apparently not as rigorously fact-checked as it could be; the latest frenzy in Washington peaked when conservative commentators found that Van Jones, Obama’s ‘green jobs czar’, had signed a questionable petition about the Bush administration role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Jones resigned earlier this month (FoxNews).

Republican talk-show hosts such as Glenn Beck have forced the issue of czars onto centre stage. And many of these positions involve key science and technology posts in the Obama administration. Carol Browner is his ‘climate czar’, overseeing cross-agency efforts to deal with energy and climate change – not, of course, to be confused with Todd Stern, who also shows up on lists of czars but whose role is as chief climate envoy to the United Nations climate talks.

Obama’s love of technology has triggered a crop of titles in this arena: Vivek Kundra is his ‘information czar’, and Aneesh Chopra his ‘technology czar’.

Some czar positions have been around for a while; George W. Bush created the ‘faith-based czar’ position, and the ‘science czar’ (a.k.a. presidential science advisor) has been around for decades (although it is a Senate-confirmed position as the head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy).

Next up on the target list appears to be David Michaels, a distinguished epidemiologist and Obama’s choice for head of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. The Washington Times minced no words this month in calling Michaels “one [of] the nation's foremost proponents of allowing junk science to be used in jackpot-justice lawsuits.”

The White House has fired back with what it calls "the truth about czars".

Posted by Alex Witze on September 17, 2009
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A report released today calls on the United States to launch a new interagency, multidisciplinary life sciences scheme aimed at tackling society's most pressing problems.

A national "new biology" initiative that brings together physical scientists, engineers and biologists of all stripes is essential to find solutions in the areas of food production, environmental protection, renewable energies and personalized medicine, the National Research Council's Board on Life Sciences concluded. The report urges that new funding be set aside on a 10-year timescale to establish the interagency effort, with money earmarked for new information technologies and training initiatives as well as scientific research.

Continue reading "New biology initiative to solve world's problems" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on September 17, 2009
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The Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force released an interim report on Thursday, calling for a comprehensive national approach to managing oceans, what goes into them and pretty much anything that they contain or affect.

It is both an honorable goal and an enormous challenge. Achieving it would mean seamless management of everything from freshwater resources, stormwater runoff and coastal ecosystems to fisheries, aquaculture, commercial shipping, offshore energy, military activities and global warming (not to mention coordination with state and local governments).

Perhaps the biggest initiative would be the creation of a National Ocean Council to coordinate federal policy, although it's not entirely clear what kind of authority that council might have. Administration officials largely offered up broad statements without going into details about how the new policy, once finalized, might actually impact these activities.

"For the first time, we as a nation say loudly and clearly that healthy oceans matter," said Jane Lubchenco, Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Today as never before, we better comprehend the connections between healthy oceans and people."

Appointed by President Barack Obama in June, the task force includes representatives from the full suite of federal agencies and departments. Its interium report will be available for public comment for 30 days, and a final report will be issued in December.

Just as a reminder, this is actually the second major ocean policy review in as many administrations, although the last one was not limited to federal agencies. As directed by Congress, President George W. Bush appointed 16 people to the US Commission on Ocean Policy, which finalized its report and closed up shop in 2004.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on September 17, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

One year after Hurricane Ike slammed into the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston, flooding the island campus with anywhere from six inches to six feet of water and causing $710 million in damages, the medical school's diagnosis looks good.

Within months of the storm, UTMB was ready to handle dangerous biological agents again, but the same could not be said about patients. The John Sealy Hospital, the school's main source of income, was shuttered after the storm. It eventually reopened, but at only a fraction of its initial capacity. Now, the Texas legislature has earmarked $150 million in direct funds to increase John Sealy's capacity back to its pre-Ike levels of 550 beds. (Houston Press)

Continue reading "A year after Ike, Texas school on the upswing" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on September 11, 2009
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The United States' climate envoy, Todd Stern, appeared on Capitol Hill Thursday to deliver what has become a depressingly familiar update. Yes, the chasm between the developed and developing worlds remains wide and deep; yes, talks are progressing with key players like China and India; yes, all sides are taking the issue seriously; no, there are no details to report; but yes, yes, of course, there is hope.

For more detail, check Bloomberg and Reuters, but suffice it to say that reporters in the room were generally left scratching their heads as to why Stern had been called to testify in the first place. And perhaps lawmakers felt the same way: Only seven members of the House Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming showed up; three stuck it out for the duration.

Indeed, there's no particular reason why anyone would expect Stern to have any major progress to report at this point. The most likely venues for breaking news come later this month, when the United Nations holds its Summit on Climate Change in New York and the G20 convenes on Pittsburgh. Moreover, Congress has just returned to town after a lengthy August recess, and pretty much everybody, including President Barack Obama, is talking about health care, not climate.

Continue reading "Stern talks; Congress flounders; EPA gears up?" »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on September 10, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Energy, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The European Commission has abandoned plans for an EU-managed scheme to buy swine flu vaccines due to a lack of support from member states, reports the European Voice.

In July, Androulla Vassiliou, the European commissioner for health, said the Commission was considering a joint EU procurement scheme for the vaccines. But the proposal now looks likely to not be included in the EU’s swine flu strategy to be published next week. Instead the Commission will offer countries “technical advice” on procurement, the report says.

Jo Leinen, a German Socialist MEP who chairs the European Parliament's environment and public health committee, said the omission is a mistake.

“We know some countries are well prepared and others are less well prepared. There must be a mechanism for shifting the vaccine... The added value of the EU is to show solidarity,” he says.

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on September 10, 2009
Categories: Health and medicine, Policy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Switzerland has this year become the world’s most competitive economy overtaking the United States, new figures show.

The country moved up one place from its ranking in 2008 to come top out of 133 others in the 2009/2010 Global Competitiveness Report, released by the World Economic Forum on 8 September. The US slipped from the top spot in 2008 taking second this year, the figures show.

Continue reading "US slips from the top of competitiveness ranking " »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on September 10, 2009
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The European Commission is expected to publish a proposal today that would offer €15 billion a year in aid to developing nations so that they can combat climate change. The Financial Times has a nice piece outlining the promise and problems with the plan. The good news is that it may help to bridge the gap between developed and developing nations at the upcoming Copenhagen talks in December. The bad news is that the proposal's is based on an estimated need of just €100 billion between now and 2020, a third of China's estimated cost for controlling just its own emissions over that same period. The plan would also allow the EU to repurpose development money for climate, something aid groups aren't too happy about.

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom (which is part of Europe as far as everyone but the UK is concerned) a series of reports is calling for more action on climate change. The first, by the government's independent advisory Committee on Climate Change calls for caps on global air travel to cut aviation-related emissions. A second report by the Institute for Public Policy Research looks at a scheme known as personal carbon trading that would allocate a carbon cap to individual citizens. The conclusion is that personal carbon trading is "politically risky", but may be necessary if other policies fail.

All these proposals come at a time of great uncertainty for the future of a global climate agreement. At a press luncheon yesterday, David Milliband, the UK's Foreign Secretary, warned that there was about a 50/50 chance that the Copenhagen talks would reach any sort of reasonable conclusion. You can see more of his fairly dire predictions by watching the video at right (courtesy of ITV).

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 09, 2009
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The British non-profit science lobby Sense About Science has unveiled the findings from its survey of 4,000 peer-reviewers. No need for suspense, I'll give you the bottom line now: Peer review is hardly perfect, but nobody's got a better idea. Interestingly though, researchers seem to think that more secrecy in the peer-review process could help to improve it.

Now the details. Overall, 69% of those surveyed said that they were "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with peer review. Another 22% could care less, and only 9% were "dissatisfied" or "very dissatisfied" (see graph right).

But that hardly means that these researchers thought peer review as it stood was the best possible system. Only a third of researchers thought that the current peer review system was the best that could be achieved by scientists.

The surveyors were also asked to weigh in about what they thought could make peer review better. The idea of "open peer review," where reviewers names are made public, scored just 20% on the survey, while a whopping 76% of researchers thought that "double blind" peer review, where the names of authors and reviewers are hidden from each other, was a good idea. That contrasts with the last time the survey was done in 2007. Back then, 27% of survey participants supported open peer review, while just 71% wanted the reviews to be done double-blind. Incidentally, most Nature-brand journals don't use double-blind peer review.

Final thought, 41% of those surveyed thought monetary compensation would make them more likely to peer-review papers. Of those wanting benjamins for their time, almost all thought societies or publishers should pony up. There's lots more in the survey, so take a look and see what you think.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 08, 2009
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African leaders are threatening to boycott the global warming summit in Copenhagen this December if negotiations come up short. Of course it's not yet clear whether they have the collective will to do so, at least as a unified block, but the message came through in no uncertain terms.

Speaking at a meeting of the Africa Partnership Forum in Addis Ababa, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi declared that African leaders are prepared to "walk out of any negotiations that threaten to be another rape of our continent.”

Though least responsible and most at risk due, Meles said, Africans have largely been locked out of the already small transfer of wealth created to help poor nations cope and develop along a cleaner path. "But we have no intention to a free ride," he added, suggesting that Africa is prepared to protect and expand forests and remains a "green field" for clean energy investments.

African has been trying to formulate a unified position since making a decision to negotiate as a block earlier this year. Environment ministers were able to collectively call on industrialized nations to reduce emissions by a whopping 25-40 percent by 2020 earlier this summer, but many details were left unresolved. This week's meeting represented the latest attempt to consolidate positions.

Press reports indicate that they made some progress, although verifying details proved difficult. More than one story (see here and here) suggested that Africans planned to call on developing nations to provide some $200 billion, presumably annually, to developing countries by 2020, although it was not clear what that money would cover.

Lim Li Lin, who works on developing country issues for the Third World Network, says Africa has always more or less negotiated as a group. The question moving forward, she says, is whether leaders will be able to settle on a concrete position and then stick to it in the negotiations. "What is clear is that all this has not impacted the negotiations yet," she says.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on September 04, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday the Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific body, delivered its official view on geoengineering. Scientists analyzed a dozen different approaches and weighed their pros and cons. Then, being scientists, they plotted their results in a bizarre phase space that nobody could understand. Many a reporter, myself included, were scratching our heads when co-author Ken Caldeira popped this little gem up onto the screen:

(Note: error bars are purely symbolic. Huh?)

Now I want to be fair, the Royal Society report is actually very well written and it contains a lot of good information about the geoengineering proposals out there. But it's a nuanced take on a complex issue. So it's not surprising that you saw a range of headlines. The most inaccurate enthusiastic one by far, came from those lovely folks at the Register:

Boffins: Give up on CO₂ cuts, only geoengineering can work

The Financial Times landed on the other end of the spectrum:

Hopes dashed for geo-engineering solutions

And in between came everybody else:

Study says 'geoengineering' to flight climate likely, but risky (USA Today)

Royal Society warns climate engineering 'could cause disaster' (the Times)

World must plan for climate emergency-report (Reuters)

Investment in geo-engineering needed immediately, says Royal Society (the Guardian)

These headlines make the report look like a Kurosawa film, but most of the actual stories are pretty accurate in my opinion. The bottom line is that the Royal Society felt that the only sure way to save the planet is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But in the event of a global climate emergency, we should at least know the consequences of geoengineering.

You can read our coverage here.

Update: I've included the updated diagram off the Royal Society website.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 02, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Neat technologies, Policy | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

Geo-engineering has been all the rage recently, and yesterday the UK-based Institution of Mechanical Engineers weighed in with their recommendations for how best to engineer the environment.

The report was a mix of the very specific and very vague. On the specific side, the panel recommended three technologies, which they believed represent the cheapest, quickest form of geo-engineering:

*Reflective roofs on buildings in order to cool urban areas (although the panel noted that this, technically doesn't count as geoengineering, since it doesn't actually involve changing the climate).

*Putting algae tanks on the side of buildings. The idea is that this algae would soak up carbon and could then be charred and sequestered.

*Finally came the suggestion that grabbed most of the headlines—fake trees. The trees are basically just carbon dioxide filters that are thousands of times more efficient than the real thing. 100,000 such trees would be able to remove all carbon from transport related CO2 emissions in the UK.

But the engineers were much more vague about how much such proposals might cost, or what their overall influence on carbon dioxide levels could be. This report is more a "case study of what needs to be done," it says. Follow-up work could be done with £10-20 million from a UK contribution to an international research programme. The report comes just days ahead of a second, more comprehensive study by the Royal Society.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on August 27, 2009
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I’ve always wanted a PhD. Working in the Nature office and not having one can make you feel like a bit of a dunce. Now it seems I could have assuaged some of my insecurities by hopping on a plane to Germany with a suitcase full of euros.

According to the German magazine Focus, “many renowned universities” have been caught up in a scandal involving thousands of doctoral candidates paying bribes to gain that precious ‘Dr’ in front of their names*.

Prosecutors in Cologne are now investigating links between a now-defunct consultancy firm and professors across the country. AP notes that the director of the consultancy firm and a Hannover law professor have already been convicted and given jail sentences in relation to the scandal.

It seems some professors may have been accepting payments of between 4,000 and 20,000 euros (£3,500-£18,000) to ‘supervise’ students’ doctorates, with ‘supervise’ meaning little more than ‘rubber stamp APPROVED’.

“We’re talking about honorary professors from all kinds of departments including medical science, law and economic science,” Guenter Feld, the prosecutors’ spokesman told Bloomberg.

* yes, I know that they might not use ‘Dr’ in Germany.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 26, 2009
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According to a report in SciDev.net a survey in China shoes that a third of workers in science and technology there would rather be civil servants or managers than do their current job.

The survey, undertaken by the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) also shows that the number of science and technology workers in China has risen by 74% since 2002, to 52 million.

Part of the problem, apparently is the pressure that comes with the job, especially in the high flying academic ranks. This includes pressure to publish as well as the pressure of constant evaluations.

Amazingly 32% of science and technology workers – and this list includes researchers, engineers, technicians and teachers – earn less than the national average. No wonder then that the civil service is seen as a more attractive career.

For more facts and figures, check out SciDev.net’s article.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on August 26, 2009
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The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents 3 million large and small businesses, wants to put the science of climate change on trial, reports the Los Angeles Times.

The chamber is pushing for the Environmental Protection Agency to hold a public hearing -- with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge to rule on whether humans are causing global warming, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Continue reading "Industry wants to try climate change " »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on August 25, 2009
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Abuse of ADHD medications appears to be rising among American teens.

According to data from poison centres fielding calls on potential teen overdoses, queries regarding attention deficit drugs rose 76%. This rise was more than increases seen generally for teenage substance abuse.

“The sharp increase, out of proportion to other poison center calls, suggests a rising problem with teen ADHD stimulant medication abuse,” write the researchers behind the analysis, published in Pediatrics.

Study author Jennifer Setlik, of Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, says there is a “rising problem” with the abuse of ADHD medications, which are sometimes taken as cognitive enhancers, for example to improve exam performance, as well as for more traditional recreational reasons.

In April last year a Nature survey found one in five respondents said they had used drugs such as ADHD treatments to stimulate their focus, concentration or memory (see: Poll results: look who's doping). Later in the year a commentary paper in Nature called for an evidence based approach to evaluating the use of cognitive enhancers by healthy people.

That commentary noted:

Safe and effective cognitive enhancers will benefit both the individual and society. But it would also be foolish to ignore problems that such use of drugs could create or exacerbate.

Setlik et al’s new study shows again how necessary research into this issue is.

Photo: by FGMB via Flickr under creative commons

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 25, 2009
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The percentage of scientific journal articles that are retracted has risen from 0.0007% in 1990 to 0.007% last year.

That's according to an analysis performed by academic-data provider Thomson Reuters, for Times Higher Education (THE). In 1990 just five of the nearly 690,000 journal articles covered by its Science Citation Index Expanded were retracted. Last year, it was 95 out of 1.4 million.

THE quotes James Parry, acting head of the UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO), as suggesting that a 'conservative' estimate of actual misconduct might be 1% - in which case, we'd expect to find 15,000 articles retracted a year. So, Parry reckons: "This suggests significant under-detection, which fits with what editors have told UKRIO".

The stat may suggest that editors are increasingly prepared to investigate claims of scientific fraud or error. "Anyone looking at this problem in detail knows of dozens of papers that are frankly fraudulent, but they are never retracted," says Aubrey Blumsohn, a campaigner and blogger for greater openness in research conduct.

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on August 20, 2009
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Potentially vital information on the prevalence of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in the UK is still not being collected, as coroners believe they are unable to test for it.

In a story now getting wide pickup, the BBC this morning reported that coroners are refusing to routinely test for CJD during post mortems, arguing that their job is only to discover the cause of death and not to collect such data.

The government wants routine tests but Michael Powers, a coroners’ law expert, told the Today programme, “This is a function which is outside the coroner’s statutory authority, because they are not – those tests – directed to ascertaining the [cause of] death in an individual case. If you step outside the coroner’s authority different considerations apply, most particularly of course consent.”

To date there have been 168 ‘definite and probable’ cases of vCJD in the UK, according to the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (pdf).

John Collinge, of University College London, told Today, “There is a concern that what we’ve seen so far may be the first wave … and that there may be more people silently infected in the community than the number of clinical cases would suggest.”

Powers said he would welcome a change to the law to enable testing and the Department of Health is running a pilot project to obtain samples from post-mortem examinations later this year (Daily Mail).

The issue is not entirely a new one however. In February last year the Guardian reported on the same issue, and was told by coroners’ society secretary André Rebello that “Coroners want to avoid any misapprehension that they might be ordering a post-mortem examination for access to research material rather than our statutory function ... Even if this was not inappropriate, coroners have neither the resources nor the time to be involved."

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 19, 2009
Categories: Health and medicine, Policy | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Yale University Press has been forced onto the defensive, amid accusations that it is unfairly curtailing a social scientist’s ability to publish her research.

The publisher has refused to print 12 cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in a book discussing the controversy these images created when they were first published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005.

Yale press is due to publish an analysis of these events by Jytte Klausen, professor of politics at Brandeis University, but is being attacked over its decision to omit the controversial material and any other images of Mohammed from the book.

Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Publishers Professors, was one of many expressing their outrage at this perceived censorship of an academic publishing their research.

“‘We do not negotiate with terrorists. We just accede to their anticipated demands.’ That is effectively the new policy position at Yale University Press,” he said last week.

Continue reading "University press caught up in censorship row" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 18, 2009
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The genomics blogosphere is abuzz over allegations that a purchasing decision of next-generation sequencing machines was politically motivated. In a November 2008 letter sent to a UK House of Lords select committee, Kevin McKernan, senior director of scientific operations at Applied Biosystems (ABI), cried foul at the Sanger Centre's decision to return five of ABI's SOLiD System machines in favour of the platform developed by Illumina/Solexa.

The letter accused Sanger researchers of bearing a grudge against ABI because of its Craig Venter-tinged connections in the race to sequence the human genome. McKernan also asserted that the institute leadership took "a more historical approach" in its decision to go with more Illumina Genome Analyzer sequencers, noting that many Sanger staff members have close ties with the rival company.

Nick Loman of the University of Birmingham ridiculed this claim. "Calling the approach historical is slightly ironic given that ABI used to be the only show in town and the Sanger had over a hundred ABI machines running during the [Human Genome Project]," he wrote on the blog Pathogens: Genes and Genomes. Moreover, Solexa, which Illumina acquired in January 2007, was headquartered in Cambridgeshire, and many of their former workers turned Hinxton, UK-based Sanger staff stayed close to home, Loman noted.

Continue reading "A rock SoLiD complaint?" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on August 14, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The upper echelons of the FDA are getting a lot of unwanted attention today. Yesterday, the top regulator of the medical devices division, Daniel Schultz, announced his resignation, and now the head of drug approvals is under investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services, reports the Wall Street Journal.

For months, the medical devices division has been on the list of Margaret Hamburg, whom Obama appointed to whip the controversy-plagued FDA into shape. At the center of the division's current mess are products that were approved despite the safety and efficacy concerns of agency scientists. The approval of such products — including a brain-zapping depression-treating device and a knee surgery device — led to allegations of being a bit too friendly with industry.

The criticism isn't just from outsiders. In a letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee last October, nine employees alleged that some scientists had been pressured to approve the devices.

Schultz has some company. Janet Woodcock is the director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, which approves drugs, and is also accused of being too cozy with industry. (Back in November, she was a drug maker hopeful for FDA commissioner but didn't get it).

Continue reading "Shakedown at the FDA" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen on August 12, 2009
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Just a month after being tapped by the White House, the physician and geneticist Francis Collins was unanimously confirmed today by the US Senate as the new director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Collins, who headed the NIH's National Human Genome Research Institute from 1993-2008, will return to the institutes' Bethesda, Maryland, headquarters with a full plate on his hands. His first duties will include getting the NIH's $10.4 billion stimulus windfall out the door and working on the new registry of approved human embryonic stem cells.

"Dr. Collins will be an outstanding leader," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement. "Today is an exciting day for NIH and for science in this country."

Collins, though widely praised for his scientific accomplishments, which include leading the Human Genome Project and discovering many disease genes, has been criticized for his openly religious views. The author of the The Language of God, Collins recently launched the BioLogos Foundation, which aims to reconcile Christain faith and science. BioLogos officials said that the new director would step down from its leadership once confirmed. (USA Today)

A round-up of early accolades follows the jump.

Continue reading "Collins confirmed" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on August 07, 2009
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The University of California has agreed to lend the Golden State nearly $200 million for the state to give back to the university at a premium.

Confused? Read on.

California is in quite a state. The spiraling budget crisis has forced the state government to make huge cuts, including hacking $2 billion in funding to the campuses of the University of California (UC), California State University, and community colleges. The UC — the best public higher education system in the world, according to rankings by China's Shanghai Jiao Tong University — alone took a $813 million hit. To plug the gap, the cash-strapped university raised tuition fees, slashed enrollment, reduced course options, and introduced mandatory unpaid furlough days for its employees.

But as bad as things are, they could be worse. Just ask Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Unable to borrow money by selling bonds, his government's credit rating has plummeted well below that of the UC's. So the university plans to borrow $199.8-million that it will then offer the California taxpayers for the state to lend back at 3.2% interest over the next three years. This will allow the universities to restart stalled building projects at eight of its 10 campuses and the state to get its money at a better rate than it would on the open market, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

Continue reading "A creative fix for the University of California's budget woes" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on August 07, 2009
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UPDATED 6/8/09 – Since this post was originally published, another grave belonging to a member of Novartis Chief Executive Daniel Vasella’s family has been desecrated (Reuters).

“There have been a series of terrorist-like attacks on individuals and company buildings. Last week, the graves of [Novartis CEO Daniel] Vasella’s parents were desecrated and the urn with the ashes of his mother was stolen,” a company spokesman told Reuters.

This is not the first time animal activists have resorted to grave robbing in support of their utterly moronic campaign. In 2004 the owners of a guinea pig farm had the body of a relative exhumed and stolen. It was later recovered.

According to the new reports, Vasella has also seen his hunting lodge in Austria burned down by those who want his company to sever ties with the company Huntingdon Life Sciences. Activists have sprayed “Drop HLS Now” on gravestones (AP).

A Novartis spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal the company “does not work with HLS and has not for many years”.

“It is important that people realize that it is not possible to discover novel products...which save thousands of human lives every year without some use of animal data, which is required by regulatory authorities,” she added.

Swiss newspaper Blick has a number of disturbing stories about these attacks on Novartis employees and other incidents.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 06, 2009
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US plans to build a new all-singing, all-dancing dangerous-pathogens lab suffered a slight setback last week, with a report from the Government Accountability Office saying the risks of building a biosafety level-four facility on the mainland haven’t been adequately looked at.

But there is still no place for poor old Plum Island, New York, in government research plans. Plum Island currently hosts a relatively small bio-safety level three research facility. As the government wants a new, huge level four-rated set of labs, Plum Island is up for sale.

“My hope of hopes is that it continues to be used as a Biolevel-3 facility. It has all of the infrastructure to support research - perhaps we could get a university program over there,” local official Scott Russell said recently (Northfork.com). “But I can’t suggest that my idea is anything but a pipe dream.”

All this leads The Scientist to suggest that anyone looking for a nice property near the Hamptons should consider the island. One recent valuation puts the property’s worth at about $2 million.

But what else could you do with the site? The Great Beyond presents: 101 uses for a Plum Island.

Continue reading "101 uses for a Plum Island" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 06, 2009
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This week South Korea sketched out several options for reducing greenhouse gases in the coming decade, inching closer to a national commitment before the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen this December.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, only industrialized "Annex I" nations were required to take on specific emissions targets.
Seoul has already announced massive investments in clean energy technologies, earning a place among a core group of developing nations that are taking significant action to curb the growth of greenhouse gas emissions. If it moves forward, South Korea would join the ranks of Mexico, South Africa and Brazil in volunteering quantifiable pledges as world leaders negotiate a follow-on treaty.

Government officials say they are considering three emissions trajectories for 2020, all using a 2005 baseline: an 8 percent increase, a return to the 2005 level or a 4 percent decrease; that compares to a projected 30 percent increase under a "business-as-usual" scenario. The 2005 baseline is revealing because South Korea's emissions have increased by 95 percent since 1990, the baseline used in the Kyoto Protocol, according to the World Resources Institute in Washington.

Compared to a 1990 baseline, the proposals seem decidedly less ambitious, and the government has not spelled out exactly how it plans to meet such a commitment. Nonetheless, says Remi Moncel, an energy and climate expert at the institute, "it’s a good sign of leadership from a developing country."

Continue reading "South Korea unveils climate proposals" »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on August 05, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Energy, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

According those ever-loquacious unnamed ‘intelligence sources’, Iran could have a nuclear bomb within a year.

Speaking this time to The Times, the sources say Iran’s nuclear scientists are merely waiting on their country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to give the word.

“If the Supreme Leader takes the decision, we assess they have to enrich low-enriched uranium to highly-enriched uranium at the Natanz plant, which could take six months, depending on how many centrifuges are operating. We don’t know if the decision was made yet,” they told the Times.

After enrichment it would take another six months to assemble a warhead, says the paper.

Continue reading "Iran nuclear news" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 03, 2009
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The US National Academies has launched its long-awaited review of the scientific evidence used to track down the alleged creator of the deadly anthrax attacks of 2001. A 15-member expert panel met in Washington DC on 30-31 July to determine whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) relied on appropriate scientific techniques when it implicated government biodefence researcher Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide last July as prosecutors prepared to indict him as the person responsible for mailing the Bacillus anthracis spores that killed five people and sickened 17 others.

"It is important that we understand what happened," Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ) told the committee on Friday. "The illogic of the investigation that I witnessed leads me to question whether the scientific and technical steps were well undertaken."

Continue reading "Anthrax investigation probe underway" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on July 31, 2009
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A former SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory researcher who allegedly destroyed $500,000 worth of protein crystals earlier this month was arrested and charged on Monday for willfully ruining government property.

The 4,000 to 5,000 now-useless protein crystals represented a “whole variety of different samples” involved in the Protein Structure Initiative, a federally-funded project to expedite the discovery of atomic-level protein structures, says Ian Wilson, director of the Joint Center for Structural Genomics (JCSG), which oversees the initiative. Some crystals were aimed at matching three-dimensional protein structures with their corresponding DNA sequences; others were part of targeted research projects including the Human Microbiome Project and efforts to map every protein made by the bacterium Thermotoga maritima.

Continue reading "Vandal destroys protein crystals in California" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on July 29, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Chemistry, Policy | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Pfizer is again reportedly close to agreeing a $75 million settlement over a drug trial in Nigeria that allegedly left 11 children dead and others injured.

Earlier this year in April it was reported that this settlement related to the trial of Trovan had been agreed (see: Pfizer settles Nigerian drug case out of court - April 06, 2009). Pfizer denied any wrongdoing in the trial, which Kano State prosecutors alleged was illegal. Pfizer, in contrast, says the trial was carried out with the consent of the Nigerian government, and conformed to standard ethical practices.

Now the agreement has been officially announced. AFP says:

The agreement, which is due to be inked on Thursday in Nigeria, was formally announced in court on Monday, lawyers from both sides said, without giving details of the amounts involved.
…
"Yes, we have agreed on the out-of-court settlement and we will sign the agreement on Thursday," confirmed Pfizer lawyer Anthony Idigbe.

AFP reports that Pfizer will cough up $35m for the victims and their families, $10m for state costs and $5m to do up Kano’s infectious disease hospitals; $50m in total. However Reuters agrees with the first two numbers but says that $30m is being set aside for “healthcare initiatives chosen by the Kano State government”; $75m in total.

Reuters’ numbers would agree with reports earlier this year from the BBC.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 29, 2009
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A poll by Gallup has put NASA and the Centers for Disease Control as the federal agencies deemed to be doing their jobs best by the US public. For the space agency, 58% of the public thought it was doing a good or excellent job, with appreciation of the CDC running at 61%.

It’s not all good for science bodies though. The Food and Drug Administration put in a rather poor show, with only 38% rating it good or excellent.

Gallup notes:

The new poll, conducted just prior to the 40th anniversary of the July 20, 1969, moon landing by Apollo 11 -- perhaps the most celebrated of all NASA achievements -- finds NASA's rating about where it has been in recent years. While not nearly as high as it was in late 1998 (a month after John Glenn's successful return to space), NASA's current excellent/good score falls within the upper half of ratings it has received over the past two decades.

Graph data: Gallup

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 28, 2009
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A multi-million refurb on the site at the epicentre of the UK’s 2007 foot-and-mouth disease outbreak has done a Lazurus and come back to life.

Earlier this year plans to do up the Institute for Animal Health at Pirbright to the tune of £120 million appeared to have been scuppered when the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs backed off (see: Britain hits a hurdle in replacing key animal-pathogen facility).

But yesterday the Government announced it would be funding a £100 million overhaul, with investment from a different sector, the newly formed Department of Business, Innovation and Skills. The money will allow the institute to implement the recommendations of reviews produced in the wake of the foot-and-mouth outbreak, including new labs (press release).

“What I hope is that it will give confidence to all our stakeholders that here at Pirbright we have the world’s leading experts. That it will be state-of-the-art and it will be as safe as it can possibly be,” says institute director, Martin Shirley (BBC).

The funding, says Shirley, is also a recognition of the “increasing threats” posed by animal diseases such as … err … foot and mouth.

Previous Pirbright
Britain hits a hurdle in replacing key animal-pathogen facility – Nature News, 10 February 2009
Setback for key UK animal lab – Nature News, 5 December 2008
British government tightens up lab biosecurity – The Great Beyond, 10 October 2008
Anybody know a good plumber? – The Great Beyond, 07 September 2007

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 28, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Earth, environment & ecology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)