Historic Gulf oil spill settlement to bolster US research

Helen Shen reports in the News Blog, research and recovery efforts linked to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill received a welcome boost on 15 November as part of a landmark settlement by the oil-and-gas giant BP plc:

The National Academy of Sciences received a US$350 million endowment, to be paid over five years, as part of the company’s resolution of criminal charges with the US government. While the academy has yet to settle on specific projects, the new funds will support a new 30-year program to study human health and the environment—including issues related oil spills—in the Gulf Coast region.

“It’s really a terrific opportunity to complete this whole portfolio of research in what’s been a tragic occurrence,” says Barbara Schaal, vice president of the National Academy of Sciences.

Continue to Helen’s post to find out more.

Marijuana measures among those voted on in US election

While the contest between President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney was clearly the main event in US general elections on 6 November, when the dust finally settled voters across the country had also weighed in on dozens of ballot measures. In the News Blog, Helen Shen, looks at some of the votes with relevance for science, health and environment policy, starting off with marijuana:

Two states win joint victory. SHUTTERSTOCK/MYCOLA

Marijuana: How high will the legal challenges go?

Colorado and Washington made history by becoming the first US states where voters have approved the legalization of marijuana outside of medicinal uses. In Colorado, voters amended the state’s constitution to allow specialty retail outlets to sell up to one ounce of the drug to adults aged 21 and older. The amendment also permits adults to grow a limited number of marijuana plants at home. In Washington, a measure legalizing marijuana also prohibits motorists from driving with more than 5 nanograms per millilitre of THC — the active component in marijuana — in their blood.

Hear about some of the other votes in Helen’s post.

Pre-Columbian fossil collectors unearthed

Native Americans that lived in the Mimbres Valley of southwestern New Mexico more than a millennium ago are well known for their distinctive pottery, but now they may have a new claim to fame. They collected fossils — apparently for ritual use in their homes, reveals Sid Perkins in the News Blog:

Finding fossils at archaeological sites in the American Southwest is unusual, say Falvey and Brett McLaurin, a geologist at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania and senior co-author of the GSA presentation. Nevertheless, Falvey notes, researchers excavating other sites — especially those without a background or interest in palaeontology — may not have not reported any such finds simply because they didn’t recognize the anomalous provenance, and therefore the ritual significance, of any fossils they had unearthed.

More details can be found in Sid’s post.

Was your degree worth it?

Catherine de Lange asks in the Nature Jobs blog, was your degree worth it?

A study tracking university students over 6 years from the moment they applied for university until well after they graduated has been published this week.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the findings reveal just how hard it has been for UK students graduating during the recession, with a significant increases in debt and lower earnings compared with the class of ’99. On a positive note, the vast majority thought it was worth it – see the infographic below.

More results can be found in Catherine’s post.

Curious about life on Mars – Curiosity has the answers!

This week’s Soapbox Science guest post is by Dr Louisa J. Preston, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at The Open University. She explains, if you are curious about life on Mars, Curiosity could have the answers…

A robotic planetary geologist landed on Mars at 6.31am GMT on Monday August 6th 2012. The appropriately named ‘Curiosity’ rover is NASA’s latest offering to help us determine whether past and/or present habitable environments exist on Mars. This car-sized, nuclear-powered mobile science laboratory is on a mission to Gale Crater, a 154 km diameter impact crater located just south of the equator. Here, scientists are hoping to learn about the environmental conditions that existed in the crater and whether these conditions would have favoured life.

Continue to the post to find out more.

Russia paroles jailed physicist

Quirin Schiermeier reveals in the News Blog, a Siberian court has finally granted parole to a Russian physicist who has spent 11 years in jail for alleged espionage and embezzling of funds. If no appeal is filed, Valentin Danilov could be released as early as next week:

In 2006, physicist Oskar Kaibyshev was given a six-year suspended prison sentence for exporting technologies with possible military use to South Korea. And in June, a St. Petersburg court sentenced to 12 and 12 ½ years in a penal colony, respectively, two professors, Yevgeny Afanasiev and Svyatoslav Bobyshev, at the city’s State Military Mechanical University for having passed on military secrets to China. All convicted scientists have consistently maintained their innocence.

The threat of prosecution is not confined to Russian scientists involved in military research. In August, the arrest of poppy expert Olga Zelenina, accused of abetting drug trafficking, caused an outcry among scientists in Russia and abroad. Zelenina, who her supporters say merely produced an expert opinion on the narcotics content in a shipment of poppy seeds, was released from custody in September pending her yet unscheduled trial.

How will this news impact the Russian scientific community? Continue to the post to find out more.

‘Hundreds of thousands’ of undiscovered marine species await discovery

Daniel Cressey explains in the News Blog,in the past researchers have produced wildly differing estimates of how many eukaryotes – and other organisms – remain undiscovered in our oceans. Now a new analysis tied to the first comprehensive register of marine species has come up with a figure somewhere under one million:

The new estimate stems from an online database called the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS), set up to provide a central place for scientists to access information.

“Scientists have been describing species in the ocean – and on land – for more than 250 years but there has never been a central place where everything gets recorded. The only thing a scientist needs to do is publish a paper,” says Ward Appeltans, a taxonomist at the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO. “The result is a lot of species have been described more than once and a lot have been described with the same name. There was becoming a lot of confusion over the names.”

The team behind WoRMS found, for example, that for cetaceans (whales and dolphins) there are 1,271 names for only 87 actual species. WoRMS is now up and running and contains around 214,000 of the estimated 222,000 and 230,000 marine eukaryotes that have been described by researchers across the globe (examples pictured).

SciComm Matters Because…

SciLogs blogger, Matt Shipman talks about one of the reasons why science communication matters in his latest post:

One reason that science communication, outside the peer-reviewed literature, is becoming more important is because of…the peer-reviewed literature.

In my opinion, this is particularly true for researchers. If you’re a researcher, you want people to see your papers. You also want to stay abreast of new findings that are relevant to your work. For a number of reasons, both of those things are becoming more difficult – which makes promoting your work and utilizing social media more important.

This is the first in what will be a series of occasional posts about why science communication is important, so stay tuned on Matt’s blog.

Did global warming cause Hurricane Sandy?

Scitable’s blogger, Samantha J. asks in her latest post, did global warming cause Hurricane Sandy?

Hurricane Sandy fueled an ongoing debate as to whether or not global warming is playing a role in the severity of storms. Some believe that Hurricane Sandy was by no means affected by global warming, but personally, I disagree. I understand that even without global warming, Sandy would still have formed and been a powerful storm. However, I, along with many other people, such as Mayor Bloomberg, believe that it was because of global warming that the storm was even more devastating and destructive as expected. As Eric Pooley from the Environmental Defense Fund puts it, Hurricane Sandy was “weather on steroids.” In this case, greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, which cause global warming, acted as the steroids that made the storm greater and more powerful than it would be without such gases.

Feel free to join in the discussion by leaving your thoughts in the comment thread.

Sing for your supper

GrrlScientist reveals in her latest post, female fairy-wrens teach their chicks a vocal password before they hatch to distinguish them from brood parasitic bronze-cuckoo chicks:

Read more in GrrlScientist‘s post.