Author Archives: Brian Owens

US Antarctic research needs funding boost and efficiency drive

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The Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.{credit}NSF/USAP photo{/credit}

Posted on behalf of Susan Moran.

Like an iceberg, US-funded science in Antarctica is bottom-heavy, and research is suffering as a result. According to a new report for the National Science Foundation, the US Antarctic Program (USAP) devotes nine times more person-days in Antarctica to logistics efforts than it does to actual scientific research. That must change in order for the United States to maintain a leadership role on the continent, but science will have to take another hit first.

The 224-page report, ‘More and better science in antarctica through increased logistical effectiveness’, was published yesterday and argues that US research facilities in Antarctica desperately need an upgrade and an overhaul. The panel recommends three ways to ensure those improvements over the next four years: cut contract labour by 20%, increase the USAP’s annual budget by 6% and divert 6% of the planned spending on science to upgrade the science-support system.  The report stresses that any up-front cuts to science will pay off within a few years by actually expanding the amount of scientific activity that can be undertaken while making research facilities safer.

“This can be done, but not without pain,” said Norman Augustine, chairman of the 12-member panel, during a press conference.  “It’s not a happy solution, but being pragmatists and wanting to see something done, I think we’re all convinced if we don’t do something fairly soon, the science will just disappear.” Continue reading →

American astronaut Sally Ride dies at 61

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Sally Ride aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger. {credit}NASA{/credit}

Cross posted from Scientific American’s Observations blog on behalf of John Matson.

Sally Ride, the first U.S. woman in space, died today at age 61, according to the Web site of her science-education company, Sally Ride Science. The cause was pancreatic cancer.

Ride was born May 26, 1951, in Los Angeles and attended Stanford University, where she received bachelor’s degrees in physics and English, as well as master’s and doctoral degrees in physics, according to her NASA bio. In 1978, the same year she earned her Ph.D., Ride was selected to join NASA’s astronaut corps.

She first flew on space shuttle Challenger for the STS-7 mission, which launched on June 18, 1983. At that time, the U.S. had yet to send a female astronaut into orbit, but two female cosmonauts had gone to space as part of the Soviet space program. Ride flew another mission the following year and had been scheduled to make a third trip to space when the 1986 Challenger disaster forced NASA to suspend the shuttle program. Instead, she served on the commission convened to investigate the accident, as she did again in 2003 after the loss of space shuttle Columbia.

Following her retirement from NASA in 1987 Ride returned to academia. According to her company bio, she became a science fellow at Stanford University and then moved to the University of California, San Diego, as a professor of physics and director of the California Space Institute. (During that time she also wrote a 1989 cover story for Scientific American about the Soviet space program.) She founded Sally Ride Science in 2001 to encourage young students to pursue studies, and ultimately careers, in math and science.

Throughout her post-astronaut years, Ride remained closely involved with NASA. In addition to the two shuttle accident investigation boards, Ride also served on the Augustine commission, a blue-ribbon panel of spaceflight experts convened by President Obama in 2009 to review NASA’s plans for human spaceflight. More recently her company partnered with NASA to administer an outreach and education program called MoonKAM during the GRAIL moon mission. Each of the two GRAIL spacecraft, now in lunar orbit, carries a MoonKAM, a digital camera dedicated for use by middle-school students.

In 1982 Ride married fellow astronaut Steven Hawley, now a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Kansas. They divorced in 1987. According to her company’s Web site, Ride is survived by her partner of 27 years, Tam O’Shaughnessy, the chief operating officer of Sally Ride Science. Together, Ride and O’Shaughnessy wrote several books for school-age children about space exploration and climate change.

Read more on Scientific American.

Data detective makes his fraud-busting algorithm public

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‘Data detective’ Uri Simonsohn has posted a paper on the Social Science Research Network describing the statistical method he used to expose suspicious data in the work of social psychologists Dirk Smeesters and Lawrence Sanna.

Smeesters resigned from Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, last month after an investigation found that he had massaged data to produce positive outcomes in his research, such as the effect of colour on consumer behaviour (see ‘The data detective‘). In May, Sanna resigned from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor for unknown reasons. But Simonsohn had also found odd statistical patterns in his data, and Sanna has asked the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology to retract three of his papers (see ‘Uncertainty shrouds psychologist’s resignation‘).

While the string of high-profile fraud cases in psychology, including that of Diederik Stapel, has some worried that psychology will earn a reputation for dishonesty, Simonsohn has previously told Nature that he thinks that is unwarranted, pointing out that at least in psychology, they are trying to do something about the problem (see ‘Replication studies: Bad copy’).

One fish, two fish and 400,000 zebrafish

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The zebrafish repository.{credit}Photo courtesy of Martin Lober, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology{/credit}

Cross posted from Nature Medicine’s Spoonful of Medicine blog on behalf of Kathleen Raven.

Hundreds of translucent creatures that biomedical researchers rely on for genetic insights settled into new digs today as researchers opened a newly refurbished and expanded animal repository called the European Zebrafish Resource Center. Housed at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in southwest Germany, the center can maintain 400,000 live fish at maximum capacity in more than 3,000 tanks, and will include lab space for on-site zebrafish in vitro fertilization. Uwe Strähle, a geneticist at KIT, told Nature Medicine by phone after the ribbon-cutting ceremony that European zebrafish researchers eager to preserve their hard-won transgenic and mutant lines may begin submitting eggs to the center. Currently the center houses 300 transgenic lines but Strähle expected the collection to expand to hold thousands of lines in the next five years.

“Some mutant forms of zebrafish cannot be replicated so it is important to preserve those lines for future research,” Strähle explained. And as if capacity wasn’t enough, the center’s equipment might make any zebrafish investigator glassy-eyed with excitement. Located a few floors above the core aquarium room that will hold only frequently requested lines are brand-new PCR machines and freezers capable of storing 80,000 sperm samples in cryopreservation.

But Strähle thinks researchers will benefit most from the center’s screening lab, stocked with—among other neat toys—a single plane illumination microscopy machine that can be used to create 4-D images of the animals, including their traits. He envisions researchers visiting the screening lab to take advantage of the tools available to add or knock out genes and breed zebrafish lines needed for their future research.

In the past, European zebrafish researchers exchanged fish with US labs like the Zebrafish International Resource Center maintained by the University of Oregon, but the costs of sending little fish across the ocean kept going up. Zebrafish research in Europe can now make a big splash on its home turf.

Read more on Spoonful of Medicine.

UNESCO set to award science prize sponsored by African dictator

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Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo has been president of Equatorial Guinea since 1979.{credit}Wikipedia{/credit}

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) will award a prize for life-sciences research sponsored by Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, President of Equatorial Guinea.

The controversial prize was first proposed in 2008 but has been in limbo for the past four years as a result of opposition from western diplomats, who pointed to corruption and human-rights abuses in the country (see ‘UNESCO delays controversial science award‘). But Obiang didn’t give up (see ‘Controversial science prize back on UNESCO’s agenda‘), and in March, UNESCO’s executive board narrowly voted to change the award’s name and push ahead. The award is now called the Unesco–Equatorial Guinea International Prize for Research in the Life Sciences, to reflect the fact that the money, US$3 million over five years, will now be provided by the government of Equatorial Guinea, rather than Obiang’s private foundation. This change in sponsor from what was listed in the prize statutes had led UNESCO’s lawyers to advise against giving out the money, but UNESCO director general Irina Bokova, who personally opposed the award, felt she had to follow the wishes of the executive board, UNESCO officials told the New York Times.

The first three winners, who each get $100,000, will be given their prize at UNESCO headquarters in Paris tomorrow. They are: Maged Al-Sherbiny, from Egypt, for his work on vaccine development and diagnostics for hepatitis C and schistosomiasis; Felix Dapare Dakora, a plant scientist at Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria, South Africa, for tackling food scarcity through his work on the symbiosis between legumes and soil bacteria; and Rossana Arroyo, a molecular biologist at the Centre for Research and Advanced Studies of the Mexican National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico City for her work on the parasitic disease trichomoniasis.

Spanish scientists ask for European intervention on national R&D policy

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Posted on behalf of Michele Catanzaro.

A group of high-profile scientific associations in Spain have asked the European Parliament to take action to stop the drastic cuts to science budgets in Spain and other countries. The Confederation of Spanish Scientific Societies (COSCE), the Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities (CRUE) and other organizations and unions made the request of Spanish members of the chamber in a letter sent last month.

The groups ask members of the European Parliament to create “a common research policy in Europe”. “The European Union is issuing recommendations on economic matters that governments take very seriously: we would like to hear recommendations on R&D [research and development] spending as well,” says Carlos Andradas, president of COSCE.

Andradas and other representatives of the signing organizations declared in a press conference on Tuesday in Madrid that they are not satisfied with the Spanish R&D budget for 2012, which includes a 25% cut to central government’s funding for science.

Spain did make an exception for science in its public-sector hiring freeze: public research organizations, such as the National Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), are allowed to hire one researcher for every ten who retire. However, hiring in universities will depend on the decisions of rectors and regional governments. Continue reading →

Live Q&A: Higgs found, so what’s next?

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Physicists working on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN have finally found the Higgs boson — the particle thought to be behind the mass of all the others. But there is still much work to be done to pin down the precise nature of the new particle. Join us at 2 p.m. BST on 5 July for a live Q&A with three CERN scientists, Matt Strassler, Seth Zenz and Zach Marshall, to find out what we still don’t know about the Higgs. Feel free to post some of your questions in advance in the comments below.

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Live blog: the Higgs announcement

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On 4 July, physicists at a conference in Melbourne, Australia, will announce the latest results from the Large Hadron Collider. Rumours are pointing to a new particle that looks very much like the Higgs (see ‘Physicists find new particle, but is it the Higgs?‘). Geoff Brumfiel will be watching the seminar from the collider’s home at CERN, Europe’s high-energy physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland. Follow the result as it happens on the live blog below, beginning at 7:45 a.m. BST.

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Mexico’s new president aims high on science

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Posted on behalf of Erik Vance.

After 12 years in exile from the presidential palace, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) claimed victory late Sunday night in Mexico’s national election (see our preview piece, ‘Science at stake in Mexico election‘). With 83% of the vote counted, Enrique Peña Nieto led with 38.6% versus 31.9% for his nearest competitor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD).

Peña Nieto — who has been an ardent supporter of privatizing Pemex, the nation’s government-run oil company — has said that he wants to increase research spending in an election in which science became a campaign issue for the first time in more than a decade.

“There is a clear and integral path for economic growth through the construction of a knowledge-based society. Mexico needs to make the transition from a manufacturing economy to an economy based on knowledge and education. The latter is more competitive, solid and equitable. It generates more innovation, better jobs with higher wages,” Peña Nieto told Nature in an e-mail exchange.

All major candidates promised to bump research spending to 1% of gross domestic product. But Peña Nieto said that even 1% isn’t enough.

He has also stressed fostering more cooperation between industry and universities. Many scientists in the country point to increased ties between the sectors as a reason that basic science funding became an issue at all this election season.

However, the PRI’s win was not nearly as definitive as the party had hoped. Part of the reason for that may be a youth movement against Peña Nieto called the ‘I am 132’ movement. The movement never endorsed a specific rival, but many clearly supported Lopez Obrador, who made science a big part of his campaign.

One of Peña Nieto’s greatest challenges will be meeting the strong climate legislation signed into law by his predecessor.

“Of Peña Nieto, I don’t know very much,” says Carlos Gay Garcia, a climate-change researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. “I haven’t heard him saying very many things about the environment or for that matter science and technology. The guy who has been talking about science and technology is Lopez Obrador.”

Upsides and downsides of openness — the view from TEDGlobal

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Posted on behalf of Philip Campbell.

Let’s start with the bad news. With every technological development that helps to make the world a better place, criminals and terrorists are out there to apply it to their own ends. Hence the use of satellite communications and a high-tech operations centre that allowed the Mumbai terrorists in 2008 to track and maximize their massacre of 172 men, women and children; hence the encrypted national communications infrastructure constructed by Mexican drugs barons; hence the threat of synthetic viruses…

This bad news was the subject of a TED talk at the TEDGlobal meeting in Edinburgh, UK, earlier this week. Yet even this pessimistic vision from global-security futurist Marc Goodman led to a positively open conclusion: get the details out there, he said, and let the crowds source solutions. “We need participatory security,” he said. “Public safety is too important to be left to the professionals.”

Goodman pointed to the growing capacity of three-dimensional printing, an open technology that other TED speakers celebrated for its capacity to empower people. Positive examples included arducopter, a multirotor drone; the Otto musical interface; a sign-language glove; and a Geiger counter developed by Tokyo Hackerspace after the Fukushima nuclear crisis.

The designs of such printable hardware are open source, said Massimo Banzi, originator of the Arduino microcontroller for interactive projects. “Our hardware is open — we publish all design files and circuits online to help others learn. Our hardware, as well as the documents, come with a Creative Commons license. It is a mash-up of open-source techs that allows people to use them easily.”

But Goodman pointed to the downside: guns and rocket launchers can be printed too, as can harmful molecules. Continue reading →