Science: Katydids, crickets, and other arthropods produce their characteristic chirps by stridulation, a process in which they scrape one rough body part against another, writes Sid Perkins for Science. Until now, it was not known whether ancient insects chirped at a single frequency or across a variety of frequencies. A recent analysis of 165-million-year-old katydid wing fragments shows that katydids sang at a single frequency of about 6.4 kilohertz, or about 6400 cycles per second. That tone is about half the frequency created by today's katydids but within the range of tones generated by living species of crickets. The chirps, which lasted about 16 milliseconds, probably helped the katydids distinguish the calls of their species in a forest filled with the sounds other insects.
BBC: Due to financial woes, NASA may be forced to withdraw from its partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA) on the dual ExoMars robotic space missions. NASA expects to know more after 13 February, when President Obama announces his 2013 budget. The US agreed to provide equipment and launch rockets for an orbiter and a rover to go up in 2016 and 2018, respectively. Because ESA has already invested heavily in the ExoMars project, it has started looking for other partners, foremost of which is the Russian space agency Roscosmos. This is not the first time the US has reneged on a project with Europe, so the decision may have "grave implications for transatlantic relations," writes Jonathan Amos for the BBC.
Nature: Small fission reactors may be used to power future NASA manned space missions. With twice the efficiency of chemical rockets, the reactors could send astronauts farther into space and at a much higher rate of speed, writes Eric Hand for Nature. Although researchers have been exploring the technology for years, funding has been problematic—until now. In a National Research Council report released 1 February, nuclear power and propulsion were ranked high on a list of the most important areas of technology development. And public opinion regarding nuclear power may be changing. Whereas the 1997 launch of Cassini–Huygens, with a radioisotope generator, was protested by antinuclear activists, the November 2011 launch of the Mars Science Laboratory, which also has a radioisotope generator, did not generate the same level of public concern.
Nature: Radioisotopes collected from atmospheric samples suggest that North Korea may have tested two nuclear weapons in 2010, if a new analysis by Lars-Erik De Geer of the Swedish Defence Research Agency in Stockholm is correct. De Geer examined radioisotope data from Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) monitoring stations, then he compared them with South Korean monitoring data and meteorological records. After about a year of work, he concluded that North Korea carried out two small nuclear tests in April and May 2010. According to De Geer, the detection of xenon-133 and xenon-133m points toward an explosion in the middle of April, and the presence of barium-140 and its radioactive decay product lanthanum-140 indicates that there was a second test in early or mid May. However, the seismic data from that time don't corroborate the radioisotope data, and the Korean peninsula is well equipped to detect the vibrations that would come from a nuclear explosion. Another possible explanation for the presence of the isotopes is that a reactor accident took place. De Geer hopes that his paper, due to appear in the April/May issue of the journal Science and Global Security, will prompt other scientists in CTBTO member states to reexamine the data.
BBC: A plan to levy charges on flights in EU airspace based on carbon emissions has been criticized by the US, Canada, and China—and China has barred its airlines from participating. The plan was implemented at the beginning of the year. The EU has estimated that airline passengers will be charged €2–12 more per flight as a result of the plan. China claims that the plan would cost Chinese airlines €95 million a year if they took part. Although the EU could forbid Chinese airlines from flying in EU airspace, doing so could damage its relationship with China. Ultimately, the issue may have to be resolved by the World Trade Organization or another international body.
Ottawa Citizen: After a quarter century of courtroom battles, Chander Grover, a physicist and former manager of the National Research Council of Canada, has agreed to abandon his last remaining lawsuit against the NRC. Born in India, Grover first complained of unfair discrimination at the NRC in 1987. In 1992 he won a landmark human rights case against the council, whose managers were shown to have "thwarted his advancement, humiliated him, unfairly fired him, then tried to intimidate witnesses from testifying on his behalf," writes Andrew Duffy for the Ottawa Citizen. Grover then proceeded to file four more human rights complaints against the NRC and was dismissed in July 2007 for "medical incapacity." Last year Grover underwent cancer treatments. "It's impossible at my age to continue and with all of the health problems I'm facing and my wife is facing," he said. "It's important, but what can I do?" He now plans to write a book about his experience.
Reuters: Early Sunday a fire broke out at the Alikhanov Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics, a nuclear research center in Moscow that houses a nonoperational 60-year-old atomic reactor. Although institute officials maintain that there was no risk of a radiation leak, Greenpeace Russia officials expressed concern. The fire, which broke out in a basement area of the facility, consisted primarily of smoke that came from an area housing power cables. The smoke was visible above the institute, and an acrid smell filled the air. About 30 emergency vehicles responded. Russian news agencies issued conflicting reports, including whether fire brigades were initially denied access and when exactly the fire was extinguished.
Nature: Twenty percent of academics from a variety of fields say they have been asked to pad their papers with superfluous references in order to get published, according to a survey conducted by Eric Fong and Allen Whilhite of the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Published in Science, the survey results also suggest that journal editors strategically target junior faculty with requests for extra citations as a condition of publication. It has been known for many years that some editors encourage extra references in order to boost their journals' impact factor, but the survey's figures were higher than expected. While 86% of the respondents said that coercion was inappropriate, and 81% thought it damaged a journal's prestige, 57% said they would add superfluous citations to a paper before submitting it to a journal known to coerce. To compensate for the potential inflationary effect that excessive self-citation can have on a journal's impact factor, Thomson Reuters started publishing impact factors with and without self-citations in 2009.
New York Times: Rare-earth elements are not that uncommon in Earth's crust, but they're typically dispersed. Economically exploitable forms are rare, however. China currently mines and processes more than 90% of rare earths on the market, and it has placed restrictions on their export over the past several years. On 1 February, Malaysian regulators granted Lynas, an Australian company, an initial operating license for a rare-earth metals refinery expected to open this year. The refinery will process concentrated rare-earth ore from a Lynas mine deep in the Australian desert. Each year it will use thousands of tons of powerful sulfuric acid to separate the valuable minerals from dirt and radioactive contaminants. According to a statement by the Malaysian Atomic Energy Licensing Board, within 10 months Lynas must submit a plan for permanently disposing of the more than 1000 tons of low-level radioactive waste that the refinery will produce each month.
BBC: Yesterday an international team of astronomers and engineers succeeded in linking all four of the large telescopes that make up the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, located on Cerro Paranal in Chile's Atacama Desert. Each of the four has been up and running since at least 2000. However, when linked together via interferometry, they form the biggest ground-based optical telescope on Earth, which offers very high spatial resolution and zooming capabilities. "From now on we'll be able to observe things we were not able to observe before," said Frederic Gonte, head of instrumentation.
Telegraph: Researchers at Imperial College London have determined that life could not exist on the surface of Mars because of a super drought that lasted hundreds of millions of years, writes Nick Collins for the Telegraph. Experts spent three years studying individual soil particles collected in 2008 by NASA's Phoenix spacecraft. Despite a warmer and wetter period in Mars's distant past, the 5000 years or so that it lasted was simply too brief for life to have established itself on the surface. "Future NASA and ESA [European Space Agency] missions that are planned for Mars will have to dig deeper to search for evidence of life, which may still be taking refuge underground," said Tom Pike, lead author of a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters.
BBC: Earth's largest volcanoes may signal impending eruptions earlier than previously thought, according to a new study in Nature. Tim Druitt of Blaise Pascal University in France and colleagues analyzed crystals in pumice rock from the Greek island of Santorini, site of the Minoan eruption in the late 1600s BC, and found that magma built up under the surface over a period of a few decades before the event. Given the 18 000–year period between the caldera's Bronze Age eruption and the previous one, that's a surprisingly short amount of time for the magma reservoir to recharge. Long-term monitoring of dormant but potentially active caldera systems could pick up on seismic indications of magma buildup, which could make the difference for any preparation efforts needed to stem loss of life.
Nature: The Japanese government is preparing to merge five of its science organizations: the RIKEN network of basic research laboratories, the National Institute for Materials Science, the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention, and the Japan Science and Technology Agency. The change is intended to increase efficiency while reducing costs. The agencies involved would pool research and administrative resources, and a supervisory body that covers all five agencies will probably be established. Few details are known about the timing or potential cost savings, and some researchers have expressed concern that the end result would be deep funding cuts and increased bureaucracy.
Science: The ICTP South American Institute for Fundamental Research (ICTP-SAIFR), which will open on 6 February, is a new regional center for theoretical physics located in São Paulo, Brazil. It is a joint project of the State University of São Paulo, the São Paulo Research Foundation, and the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy. According to its website, the ICTP-SAIFR's goals are to conduct theoretical physics research at the highest international standards, provide an international center for schools and workshops, and support research in those South American countries where theoretical physics research is not yet well developed.
Chronicle of Higher Education: The latest development in the controversy concerning open access to scholarly research is the boycott of Elsevier, the world's largest scientific journal publisher. By Tuesday evening about 2400 scientists had signed an online pledge not to publish or do any editorial work for the company's journals, writes Josh Fischman for the Chronicle of Higher Education. It began with an irate blog post on 21 January by Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge. The boycotters claim that Elsevier charges too much for journal content, that its bundling of subscriptions forces libraries to pay for journals they don't want in order to get the ones they do, and that the company is a strong supporter of the Research Works Act. Representatives of Elsevier counter that the company offers a variety of packages and pricing schemes and is willing to negotiate discounts. They also emphasize that the company invests in infrastructure, pays editors, and identifies peer reviewers.
Daily Mail: Neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have been developing a computer program that can decode brain activity and put it into words, writes Tamara Cohen for the Daily Mail. To monitor information from the temporal lobe, where sounds are processed, the scientists inserted electrodes into the brains of 15 patients whose skulls had been cut open for an epilepsy treatment. As the patients listened to a person speaking, the computer analyzed how the brain processed the words they heard. It was able to translate the spoken words into patterns of electrical activity and then translate them back into the original sounds, or something very similar. Brian Pasley, coauthor of a paper published in PLoS Biology, said that with more work, brain recordings could allow scientists to "synthesize the actual sound a person is thinking." Such technology could benefit people whose speech has been affected by stroke or degenerative disease.
Gizmodo: Although NASA canceled its Constellation program, key research from the project could be put to use on future spacecraft. While developing the Ares 1 rocket, engineers discovered that it had a crucial flaw: During the final stages of a launch, the burning down of the solid rocket caused the entire vehicle to oscillate so rapidly that the crew couldn't read the digital display. Rather than involving a costly fix, however, the problem proved to have a relatively simple solution. After an extensive period of trial and error, the engineers decided that, instead of trying to fix the shake, they would make the digital display strobe in time with the vibration. In his article, Gizmodo staff writer Brent Rose describes his trip to NASA's Ames Research Center, where he got the chance to climb into the "driver's seat."
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