Science: Three cities vying to host a €1 billion neutron beam research center called the European Spallation Source (ESS) last week submitted bids to a specially created, independent panel of "wise people." "Rational criteria are better than the handshake of two powerful people," says Colin Carlile of Lund University in Sweden, director of the ESS-Scandinavia consortium.
Early in the decade the ESS project foundered and its central project office closed in 2003 due to a lack of political will to get the facility constructed. Meanwhile, the United States built the Spallation Neutron Source in Tennessee, and Japan built a source as part of its nearly complete J-PARC facility at Tokai.
ESS was given new impetus by the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI), a body tasked by the European Union with drawing up a list of planned large facilities that EU nations should work together on.
ESS was one of 35 projects in the first ESFRI road map released in 2006. Three cities were soon vying to host ESS--Lund in Sweden, Bilbao in Spain, and Debrecen in Hungary--and seeking allies. The Lund team is building an alliance of five Scandinavian nations, the three Baltic states, and Poland. Debrecen is working on its central European neighbors (including Poland) as well as Russia. And the Debrecen and Bilbao teams pledged to support each other should one of them have a face-off with Lund.
Daily Telegraph: Pensioned-off engineers will have to be brought out of retirement if the revival of nuclear power is not to be hit by serious delays, the UK government has been warned by members of the British Nuclear Energy Society. A shortage of professional engineers and skilled trades is threatening plans to build new nuclear power stations around the country to ensure security of electricity supply and avoid the risk of blackouts, they claimed.
Chronicle of Higher Education: Two years ago, the National Academies sounded the alarm in a widely cited report, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” that America was slipping behind other countries in science and technology. On Tuesday leaders from academe and business met here to try to refocus Congress’s attention on the report’s many recommendations that require lawmakers’ action. One expected topic of discussion on Tuesday is a lobbying effort already under way to persuade Congress to increase federal spending for physical-sciences research significantly this year. The money could be squeezed into a broader supplemental-appropriations bill that legislators are expected to consider in the coming weeks to finance the Iraq war.
Die Spiegel: Nuclear power is too dangerous. Coal is too dirty. Gas involves too much dependence on Russia. And renewables are insufficient. So just where is Germany going to get its power from?
Science: First the bedroom clock reassures you that you're right on schedule. Moments later, the kitchen clock tells you that you're running minutes behind. If you find that annoying, pity the geochronologists. For decades, two of their workhorse timepieces--isotopic clocks ticking to the steady decay of two different radioactive elements--have been disagreeing by millions of years. Now geochronologists have recalibrated one of the clocks, bringing it into agreement with the other. They've tried it before, but this time it looks like the fix will stick. "This is a huge step forward," says geochronologist Mike Villeneuve of the Geological Survey of Canada in Ottawa. "You'd like to see it reproduced, but it looks very solid to me." The synchronization of clocks lends more support to a link between huge volcanic eruptions and mass extinctions.
National Geographic News: Earth's jet streams—high-altitude winds that influence storm direction—may be changing due to global warming, possibly making it easier for hurricanes to form, a new study says. Jet streams in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres have moved toward the poles and are slightly higher now than they were in 1979, according to analyses of data collected between 1979 to 2001. Researchers also discovered that the jet stream in the Northern Hemisphere, which can affect the formation of hurricanes over the Atlantic Ocean, is a little weaker than it was two decades ago. More studies are needed to conclusively link the shifts to global warming, the scientists say.
Science: More than 400,000 asteroids have been identified in the solar system to date. These objects are thought to be the surviving remnants of the planetesimals that formed the planets about 4.6 billion years ago. The ages and mineralogical characteristics of these planetesimals can be estimated through high-precision laboratory analyses of the compositional and isotopic properties of meteorites, of which more than 30,000 samples exist.
Until now there has been no way to estimate when an asteroid formed, other than assuming that its age was similar to that of most meteorites. In the 25 April Science there is a new paper that present results of a remote spectroscopic study to show that a number of asteroids are enriched in the oldest known objects in the solar system (calcium-aluminum inclusions or CAIs), thereby making them the most ancient asteroids currently known.
Nature: What do you see if you peer into the exhaust of a jet engine larger than our Solar System? Only astronomers with the largest radio telescopes can see the full picture — and definitive observations are beginning to filter through.
The Guardian: The UK's Daily Telegraph's science correspondent, Nic Fleming, is believed to be in negotations over plans to make his role redundant and, should he go, there do not seem to be plans to replace him.
The situation has reinforced the view that the media fail to recognise science's popularity with, or relevance to, the public. Reporting is either dumbed down, sensationalised, or spiked by executives with humanities degrees and an inability to distinguish one end of a hybrid embryo from another.
While science journalists proudly trace their origins back to the 1920s, doomsayers fear their field is being slowly invaded by technology correspondents (who first appeared in 1985), encroached on by health correspondents and made to seem marginal by the more recent obsession with the environment.
"Science in the daily media is too often reported in the same deferential way as political journalists used to report politics in the 1950s," says Jonathan Leake, science and environment editor at the Sunday Times. "Many of the tensions, rows and skulduggery in the science community get far less attention than they would in business or politics."
The main criticism is that respected journals such as Science and Nature - along with active news agencies such as AlphaGalileo, EurekAlert! and a plethora of less rigorous journals - control much of the science correspondents' output. An onslaught of embargoed, mid-week press releases leaves the Sundays with no choice but to pursue factually thin sensationalism.
"The science correspondents are individually very good but everyone publishes the same stories at the same time and that can make it dull," says Leake. "Although it would be a serious mistake to do away with expert science writers, any daily editor facing the pinch might wonder if they could get the same stories from the wires."
This relentless PR churn has another danger, according to Lawrence McGinty, ITV's health and science editor. "There's little time to pursue your own ideas when everyone is under pressure from news desks not to miss a story," he says.
BBC News: An observatory has opened in an area of Northumberland recognised as having the least light pollution in England. The £450,000 Kielder Observatory will offer astronomers views of the universe uncluttered by intruding light from towns and cities. The timber structure is perched on a hilltop location on Black Fell and was chosen because the area is famous for having the darkest skies in England. It is hoped the observatory will be popular with professional and amateurs. The Kielder Observatory has been funded by the Northumberland Strategic Partnership with help from regeneration agency One NorthEast, the European Regional Development Fund and the Northern Rock Foundation.
The Guardian: We may not be able to travel to the centre of the Earth, but computer models have helped further our understanding of what's under our feet.
Nature News: Battling rumours of death beams and mind control, an ionosphere research facility in Alaska called HAARP finally brings science to the fore. Sharon Weinberger reports.
NPR: In order for scientists to measure the strength of a hurricane, they typically must rely on the tricky maneuver of flying an airplane through the storm. But a discovery from the field of underwater acoustics means it's possible to measure a hurricane's strength just by listening to the sounds it makes — under the sea.
BBC News: Two hundred years later, the general principle of using clocks to aid navigation still stands. But the latest generation of timepiece, to be launched into space onboard the Giove-B satellite, is a world away from Captain Cook's. "Such a clock has never been flown," Pierre Waller, an engineer at the European Space Agency (Esa), told BBC News. The beating heart of Giove-B, the second test spacecraft for Europe's Galileo global satellite-navigation system, is a hydrogen maser atomic clock. Following its launch from the Baikonaur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, it will become the most precise time piece to orbit the Earth. It will be accurate to one billionth of a second per day, or one second in three million years.
Nature: Science funding in the European Union needs to be revised to better serve economic, social and environmental goals, Luke Georghiou argues.
Japan Times: Full-fledged reinforcement of the international nuclear nonproliferation framework is of vital importance for facilitating peaceful use of nuclear power and thereby for addressing the pressing global challenges of energy supply and global warming, according to a private policy study group. To attain this goal, all nations, regardless of whether they have nuclear capability, must work on nonproliferation initiatives, such as stepped-up disarmament efforts and reinforcement of nuclear site inspections, according to the Study Group on Nuclear Nonproliferation. The proposal by the 12-member expert group, headed by Shunji Yanai, former ambassador to the U.S., was submitted to Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura last Wednesday
Los Angeles Times: The technique of painting in oils was developed in Asia as long as 800 years before it appeared in Europe, according to a new report in the Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectroscopy. The research is based on an analysis of murals found inside caves at Bamian in Afghanistan.
"This is the earliest clear example of oil paintings in the world," said Yoko Taniguchi, a historian at Tokyo's National Research Institute for Cultural Properties and one of the authors of the report.
The binders and pigments used in the Bamian murals were identified using gas chromatographs at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles and a variety of X-ray technologies at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France
The synchrotron technology enabled researchers to study each layer in the paintings, identifying pigments and binders.
New York Times: At a time when the world’s top climate experts agree that carbon emissions must be rapidly reduced to hold down global warming, Italy’s major electricity producer, Enel, is converting its massive power plant here from oil to coal, generally the dirtiest fuel on earth. Over the next five years, Italy will increase its reliance on coal to 33 percent from 14 percent. Power generated by Enel from coal will rise to 50 percent. And Italy is not alone in its return to coal. Driven by rising demand, record high oil and natural gas prices, concerns over energy security and an aversion to nuclear energy, European countries are expected to put into operation about 50 coal-fired plants over the next five years, plants that will be in use for the next five decades.
Science: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has substantially modified the way it updates a database on chemical hazards that influences how chemicals are regulated. The agency says the changes should make the process more transparent and more rigorous, and speedier. But critics argue that the new procedure is more secretive and gives too much clout to federal agencies that pollute or face massive cleanup costs. One result, they say, will be further delays in regulation.
Technology Review: Earthquake researchers in California hope to take advantage of the motion sensors in laptops to create an earthquake-sensing network. By putting computers in homes and businesses to work as seismic monitors, the researchers hope to pull together a wealth of information on major quakes, and perhaps even offer early warnings, giving a few seconds' notice of a potentially devastating quake. The Quake Catcher Network (QCN) is in the beta testing stage, with links to several hundred laptops. It's a distributed computing network, like SETI@home, which searches for intelligent signals from space, and Folding@Home, which focuses on protein folding. Machines in the earthquake network would monitor motion and report big shakes to a central server. If a horde of reports came in from a particular area, it could indicate an earthquake. The network will initially focus on the quake-prone San Francisco Bay and the Greater Los Angeles Basin areas of California.
The Guardian: The White House is today set to unveil a video it claims supports allegations that North Korea was helping Syria build a nuclear reactor. The suspected reactor was destroyed by Israeli planes last September, in an attack reminiscent of Israel's 1981 raid on the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq. Little is still known about the raid seven months on, and today's evidence has been keenly anticipated. US media reports say the video images, believed to have been obtained via Israeli intelligence, show Korean faces among the workers at the Syrian plant.
Nature News: Physicists in Italy claimed last week to have seen particles of dark matter. Their announcement has got their rivals riled and raises questions about what constitutes evidence of a new particle. Rita Bernabei of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Rome presented her team's latest results on 16 April at an international meeting of particle physicists in Venice, Italy. Their detector, DAMA/LIBRA (Dark Matter Large Sodium Iodide Bulk for Rare Processes), located deep under the country's Gran Sasso mountain, seems to be observing dark matter, Bernabei says. Most agree that the experiment is picking up something: “They're seeing a signal, there's no doubt about that,” says Tim Sumner of Imperial College London. But despite this, critics say that they don't believe the detector has found the elusive particles. “For me, it's not proof that they have seen dark matter,” says Gilles Gerbier, a physicist at the Centre for Atomic Energy in Saclay, France. He adds that he's stumped by what's causing the signal.
NPR: The Colombian government revealed last month that the country's FARC rebels were seeking to acquire enriched uranium. The rebels may have been more interested in trading the uranium to a terrorist group than in developing it into nuclear arms for their own purposes. A stash subsequently uncovered in Colombia proved to be harmless. But the case shows that the danger of terrorist or insurgent groups acquiring nuclear materials on the black market could be a looming threat. Terrorism experts say it points to a danger that's greater than many people realize.
New Scientist: A group of icy objects in the outer solar system appear years younger than their suspected age--1 billion years old.
The largest member of the family, called 2003 EL61, was discovered in 2005. In 2007, astronomers found five smaller objects travelling in similar orbits. Their paths suggested they all formed a single object that was broken apart in a collision more than a billion years ago.
A team led by David Rabinowitz of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, US, have released a paper on Arxiv that the brightness of the large object and four of the smaller ones (the fifth could not be observed) changes little when observed from various points along Earth's orbit. That suggests their surfaces are covered with fresh powdery ice no more than 100 million years old.
allAfrica.com: Hamstrung by unpredictable climatic changes that have reduced the water levels in Lake Victoria and the amount of hydroelectricity generated by dams along the River Nile, the Ugandan government is turning to the more predictable nuclear power. The country's Energy and Mineral Development Minister, Daudi Migereko, estimates that Uganda will be in a position to generate nuclear energy from its uranium deposits within the next 10 to 15 years.
Los Angeles Times: In the more than a century since 'perfect' platinum-iridium cylinders were first used as the world's kilogram standards, their weights have mysteriously fluctuated. Scientists are rethinking what the measure means.
Space.com: Experts took part in a special panel "Forging the Future of Space Science: The Next 50 Years," held at the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). The discussion is part of an international public seminar series, marking the 50th anniversary of the International Geophysical Year that launched science into space. The colloquia series is organized by the Space Studies Board, a research arm of the National Academy of Sciences. Leonard David describes some of the conclusions reached at the syposium at space.com
Science: The international team of climate change scientists that produced an influential series of reports last year--and won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize--will be doing things a little differently in the future. Government delegates to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), meeting last week in Budapest, Hungary, approved a plan for the 20-year, 100-nation enterprise that would generate more precise and relevant information on climate change--without taking any longer than the current 6-year gap between reports. To do so, the delegates endorsed procedural changes that scientists had proposed to streamline the process.
Various: More than 900 scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) say they have personally experienced political interference in their work, according to a survey released today by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). The report has been picked up by ScienceNOW, Reuters, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post
"Our investigation found an agency in crisis," said Francesca Grifo, director of UCS's Scientific Integrity Program. "Distorting science to accommodate a narrow political agenda threatens our environment, our health, and our democracy itself."
The survey results show "an agency under siege from political pressures," says UCS while in a statement EPA says that the concerns may largely reflect a misunderstanding of how policy is made. EPA spokesman Jonathan Shradar said the findings will not change anything.
The survey was sent to the majority of 7000 scientists at EPA last summer, and 1586 filled it out.
Among the UCS report's findings:
– 889 scientists (60 percent) said they had personally experienced at least one instance of political interference in their work over the last five years.
– 394 scientists (31 percent) personally experienced frequent or occasional "statements by EPA officials that misrepresent scientists' findings."
– 285 scientists (22 percent) said they frequently or occasionally personally experienced "selective or incomplete use of data to justify a specific regulatory outcome."
– 224 scientists (17 percent) said they had been "directed to inappropriately exclude or alter technical information from an EPA scientific document."
– Of the 969 agency veterans with more than 10 years of EPA experience, 409 scientists (43 percent) said interference has occurred more often in the past five years than in the previous five-year period. Only 43 scientists (4 percent) said interference occurred less often.
– Hundreds of scientists reported being unable to openly express concerns about the EPA's work without fear of retaliation; 492 (31 percent) felt they could not speak candidly within the agency and 382 (24 percent) felt they could not do so outside the agency.
The UCS investigation also revealed that EPA scientists cannot freely communicate their findings to the media, public or colleagues. Seven-hundred-eighty-three respondents (51 percent) said EPA policies do not let scientists speak freely to the news media about their findings. Scientists also shared anecdotes about being barred from presenting their research at conferences and their difficulties clearing research publication articles with EPA managers.
Scientists who reported political interference tended to work in offices that write regulations rather than in basic research labs. Hundreds said they feared retaliation by officials if they voiced concerns about EPA regulations.
In optional essays, scientists repeatedly singled out the Office of Management and Budget at the White House, accusing officials there of inserting themselves into decision-making at early stages in a way that shaped the outcome of their inquiries. They also alleged that the OMB delayed rules not to its liking. EPA actions "are held hostage" until changes are made, a scientist from the EPA's Office of Air and Radiation wrote.
Nature: The popular caricature locates the origins of modern science in the natural philosophies of ancient Greece and the rediscovery of their spirit during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. It passes decorously over the intervening period, deemed to be a hotbed of superstition. In fact, the notion of a Universe governed by laws accessible to human reason — the precondition for science — emerged in Western Europe largely during the twelfth century, several hundred years earlier than we have come to imagine.
BBC NEWS: The US space agency (Nasa) has extended the international Cassini-Huygens mission by two years. The unmanned Cassini-Huygens spacecraft entered orbit around Saturn in 2004 on a mission that was supposed to come to an end in July this year. The two-year mission extension will encompass some 60 extra orbits of Saturn and more flybys of its moons.
Science: Semiconductor technology has taken us a long way by making devices of ever smaller size. But eventually, as the transistors approach the size of molecules, quantum effects become important. What will then be the form of future nanoelectronic devices? Can quantum mechanics be used to control device operation? And can they operate at reasonable temperatures? Nanoscale transistors made from graphene may provide ways to address these questions. In this week's Science magazine, Ponomarenko et al. describe graphene single-electron transistors etched to sizes as small as ~30 nm, which have quantum-confined energy states, and control the motion of single electrons. This complements investigations of single-electron transistors from graphene flakes, quantum interference devices, and ~200-nm etched graphene dots
Nature: After a 30-year gap, all eyes are back on Mercury as the MESSENGER probe gives us our second glance at the Sun's nearest neighbour. Hints of intriguing results to come are already at hand
NPR: In West Virginia, science lessons on climate change have the potential to divide teachers from students, and students from their parents. But one teacher, Tiffany Litton, has earned the trust of her students. Her classroom, she says, is a place for honest inquiry, not a forum for anyone — whether the coal industry or environmentalists — to promote an agenda.
Science: Earth is a complex system in which many biological and physical components interact across all space and time scales. To understand this system, earth scientists have traditionally built large, multi-component models. However, it is difficult to know when such a model has become sufficiently detailed for its task and how confident one can be in its predictions. In a generic linear system with feedbacks, Roe and Baker have shown that normally distributed feedbacks give rise to a highly skewed distribution of responses, similar to those seen for climate sensitivity in ensembles of global models. Even relatively narrow ranges of uncertainty in the feedbacks can be amplified in the response. Thus, besides refining the feedback uncertainties in traditional earth system models, scientists and policy-makers must explore complementary approaches to modeling.
The Guardian: Fears that the rapid draining of water from the top of Greenland's ice sheet may be contributing to the rise of global sea levels have been allayed by new research. Though scientists confirmed that the water can drain away faster than Niagara Falls, it did not seem to accelerate the movement of the ice sheet into the ocean as previously thought.
Nature News: Some experts think that a quantum computation could be plaited like a skein of string. And now they may have found the sorts of string they need, finds Liesbeth Venema.
When Alexei Kitaev published a preprint suggesting that the topological properties of quasiparticles, moving around each other and behaving as anyons, could be used as the basis for a new form of error-proof quantum computing, it seemed absurd.
“I laughed when I first read it,” recalls Nick Bonesteel, a theoretical physicist at Florida State University in Tallahassee. And there may still be some people laughing today — but at least a few of them are doing so with excited anticipation.
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Devices Based on the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect May Fulfill the Promise of Quantum Computing (October 2005)
Physics Today Online: In a lecture celebrating NASA's 50th anniversary at George Washington University yesterday, theoretical astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and his daughter Lucy Hawking, a journalist and book author, argued that an active human spaceflight program is one of the few opportunities for governments to attract students into the sciences.
 “The low esteem in which science and scientists are held by the public is a significant problem,” said Stephen Hawking. “Never before has science and technology played such a big role in our lives, and yet the children of today are not interested in science.”
Lucy Hawking followed up on her father’s observation by providing examples of the public's poor grasp of scientific knowledge. She said that “72% of UK students couldn’t identify the Moon from a picture. And only 4% of US adults could name a living scientist, although 96% of those surveyed said it was important for the US to invest in science education.” A large number of scientists were inspired to go into science because of an interest in astronomy; “Kids never tire of hearing about human spaceflight,” she added.
 Stephen Hawking pointed out that NASA’s budget forms a small part of the US GNP (gross national product) and that increasing investment in the international space exploration budget by a factor of 20 would still be a small amount (0.25%) of the world’s financial resources. Humanity can afford to battle earthly problems like climate change and still have plenty of resources left over for human spaceflight exploration, he said.
"A goal of a base on the Moon by 2020 and of a manned landing on Mars by 2025 would reignite the space program and give it a sense of purpose in the same way that President Kennedy's Moon target did in the 1960s," Stephen Hawking said. Humans should return to the Moon because it is "close by and relatively easy to reach," and, assuming there are water deposits at the lunar poles, it could be a base for travel to the rest of the solar system.
 Mars would be "the obvious next target", with its abundant supplies of frozen water and minerals brought close to the surface through volcanic eruptions. "There is also tantalizing possibility that life may have been present there in the past." Saturn’s moon Titan sounds like an intriguing place to visit, he said, although it's cold: “I wouldn’t want to live next to a lake of liquid methane.”
Hawking dismissed robotic missions as a way to inspire the next generation of children because although "robotic missions are much cheaper and may provide more scientific information, they don't catch the public imagination in the same way.”
Although attracting children to science education is one of Hawking’s reasons for supporting NASA’s plans to return to the Moon, he said that human space exploration should be a long-term (200-500 years) strategy for the species, including attempting interstellar travel.
“If only 1% of the 1000 or so stars within 30 light-years of Earth has an Earth-size planet at the right distance from its star for liquid water to exist, that would make for 10 such planets in our solar system's neighborhood,” he said. “If we want the human species to survive another million years, then we need to ‘boldly go where no one has gone before.’”
Hawking also theorized about the existence of life elsewhere in the universe, stating that he believed primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare. He then joked, "some would say it has yet to occur on Earth."
Washington Post: Concerned that not enough attention is being paid to the risk of a nuclear attack, a Senate committee yesterday looked at the consequences of such a terrorist strike in Washington -- and said that more could be done to save lives. A hearing, called by the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, featured charts showing the horrific effects of a small nuclear device detonating near the White House. It was the panel's third session in recent months on the threat of a nuclear explosion.
BBC news: Nasa's Stereo orbiters have captured stunning new images of spaceborne debris thrown out from the Sun. The twin spacecraft have seen Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) hurling material into a comet, ripping off its tail. Scientists hope the probes will allow better forecasting of CMEs, which sometimes disrupt communication systems on Earth.
The Guardian: Sir Nicholas Stern has warned that the gloomy predictions of his high-profile review of the future effects of global warming underestimated the risks, and that climate change poses a bigger threat than he realised. Stern said this week that new scientific findings showed greenhouse gas emissions were causing more damage than was understood in 2006, when he prepared his study for the government. He pointed to last year's reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and new research which shows that the planet's oceans and forests are soaking up less carbon dioxide than expected.
Stern said the new findings vindicated his report, which has been criticised by climate sceptics and some economists as exaggerating the possible damage. "People who said I was scaremongering were profoundly wrong," he told a conference in London.
Nature: X-ray data reveal that our Galaxy is shedding part of its gas, a phenomenon previously associated only with much more active star-forming galaxies. So what is driving the process in the Milky Way?
BBC News: Scientists have completed the first stage of an ambitious plan to drill down into an earthquake-generating region near Japan. The project saw holes bored 1.4km into the sea floor, producing 3D images of stresses inside the quake zone. The Nankai Trough produced major lethal earthquakes and tsunami during the last century. The eventual aim is to place instruments 6km deep in the crust, possibly as an early warning system. Findings from the initial phase of the Nankai Trough Seismogenic Zone Experiment (NanTroSEIZE) were presented here at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) annual meeting.
Reuters: China will complete a new research station in the interior of Antarctica next year, state media said on Sunday, expanding its presence on the continent. The official Xinhua news agency cited Sun Bo, head of the Chinese Antarctic expedition team, as saying that an expedition to start in November would build the main structure of the new station situated on Dome A, the highest point on the continent at 4,093 meters above sea level. The country's third scientific research station on the continent, it is expected to be finished by next January, Xinhua cited Sun as saying after returning from the country's 24th scientific expedition there.
The Daily Californian: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will lay off 535 employees beginning as early as mid-May, officials announced Tuesday. The lab will release full-time employees who largely work in administration, in addition to scientists and engineers, said lab spokesperson Lynda Seaver. The last time it let go of permanent workers was 35 years ago. "We're doing everything to make sure we still meet our mission, but obviously this does have an effect," Seaver said. "There are a lot of good people we're going to have to release."
New York Times: American innovators — with their world-class strengths in product design, marketing and finance — may have a historic opportunity to convert the scientific know-how from abroad into market gains and profits. Mr. Hill views the transition to “the postscientific society” as an unrecognized bonus for American creators of new products and services. Mr. Hill’s insight, which he first described in a National Academy of Sciences journal article last fall, runs counter to the notion that the United States fails to educate enough of its own scientists and that “shortages” of them hamper American competitiveness. The opposite may actually be true. By tapping relatively low-cost scientists around the world, American innovators may actually strengthen their market positions.
Los Angeles Times: A successful Chinese missile test last year that destroyed one of China's own aging satellites has substantially added to space debris around Earth, increasing the danger that a chain reaction of colliding space junk could threaten parts of the world's satellite network, scientists said Tuesday.
The threat is that debris could begin slamming into other debris, creating a cascading effect called supercriticality, according to scientists addressing the American Physical Society conference here this week.
"Debris in space is already a problem," said David Wright, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Mass. "But it's potentially a very big problem."
>Geoffrey Forden, an MIT physicist and expert on the Chinese space program, said the danger from space debris was actually more of a worry than the threat that the Chinese, or some other country, could intentionally cripple American space assets with antisatellite weapons.
According to Wright, the Chinese shoot-down on Jan. 11, 2007, added more than 2 million pieces of debris in low-Earth orbit, where most satellites are located.
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New York Times: A team of Italian and Chinese physicists on Wednesday renewed a controversial claim that they had detected the mysterious dark matter particles that astronomers say swaddle the galaxies in halos and direct the evolution of the universe. The team, called Dama, from “DArk MAtter,” and led by Rita Bernabei of the University of Rome, has maintained since 2000 that a yearly modulation in the rate of flashes in a detector nearly a mile underneath the Gran Sasso mountain in Italy is the result of the Earth’s passage through a “wind” of dark matter particles as it goes around the Sun. Other groups of hunters of dark matter have just as consistently failed to find any evidence of the putative particles.
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Washington Post: The directors of the nation's three national nuclear weapons laboratories say that budget cuts by Congress and the Bush administration have reduced their ability to carry out scientific research needed to ensure the reliability of the nation's nuclear arsenal in future years.
Nature: A particle-like object with a quarter of an electron's charge is the latest find in a hotbed of quantum-physical experimentation, the fractional quantum Hall fluid. Its significance is more than esoteric.
ENN: The world needs tougher action to combat global warming than a plan by President George W. Bush to halt a rise in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions only by 2025, delegates at a climate conference in Paris said on Thursday. South Africa, one of 17 nations at the two-day global warming talks that started on Thursday, called Bush's proposals "disappointing" and unambitious when many other industrialized economies are already cutting emissions.
The Times: Scientists at IBM say they have developed a new type of digital storage which would enable a device such as an MP3 player to store about half a million songs - or 3,500 films - and cost far less to produce.
In a paper published in the current issue of Science, a team at the company's research centre in San Jose, California, said that devices which use the new technology would require much less power, would run on a single battery charge for "weeks at a time", and would last for decades.
So-called 'racetrack' memory uses the 'spin' of an electron to store data, and can operate far more quickly than regular hard drives.
BBC Newsnight: Nicholas Owen, from the solar theory group at St Andrews University got loud applause when he asked a panel on the crisis in UK science funding at the annual meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society: "I'm a PhD student in solar physics. Why, in the current climate, should I and other students take the risk of continuing to do research in this area?"
The answer he got, from John Womersley, director of science programmes at the Science and Technology Facilities Council, was criticised as patronising: "If you cared about money you wouldn't be a scientist at all would you," he told the students in the hall.
"You may feel it's a bigger gamble than you want to make, knowing what you do about future funding."
"But if it's not rewarding, and it's not exciting and you don't feel you can make a contribution, then don't do it. If you can, then let's figure out a way that you can. The future budgets make it tough, I can't deny that."
Susan Watts investigates why UK scientists are so upset with the labour government over science funding.
New York Times: Jet fuel is now the largest expense for most airlines, and for American carriers each penny increase in price per gallon costs nearly $200 million a year. The industry is also becoming increasingly nervous about what happens when that fuel is burned. Aviation is responsible for about 2 percent of global emissions of greenhouse gases, and that share will rise as air travel continues to grow.
So the industry is scrambling to build greener airplanes — to save weight and improve engine efficiency, with an eye toward reducing operating costs and emissions.
In the short term, a revolution in jet engines is about to occur, with radically different designs that use gears to cut fuel consumption, noise and pollutants. And those new engines will power planes built more and more with carbon composite materials, which are lighter and may also be safer than the aluminum they replace.
The biggest change with aircraft is electricity: The 777, a mid-1990s design, can generate up to 270 kilowatts of electricity, enough to run a small neighborhood of houses. The 787, would make five times as much, 1.35 megawatts, in order to power a multitude of motors and pumps that help make the place lighter and safer.
Science: Earth has its high-standing continents and low-lying ocean basins, thanks to plate tectonics. And Mars has its smooth northern lowlands and its cratered highlands. But there's no credible sign that plate tectonics ever operated on Mars, so how did a third of the planet come to be as much as 4 kilometers lower than the rest? For the past quarter-century, a leading theory has held that a giant impact battered the young planet and excavated the northern lowlands, but that idea seemed to have serious problems.
Now, two new studies purport to ease the difficulties with a giant impact. In one study, researchers reveal the true dimensions of the huge "Borealis basin," making it look much more like the crater of a giant impact. And a second group has run simulations that suggest how an impactor could have blasted out an 8000-kilometer-wide crater without melting it into an unrecognizable puddle of magma. "I think there's much to recommend [a giant impact] now with all this new work," says Sean Solomon, a planetary geophysicist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in Washington, D.C.
NPR: From a distance, the spinning windmills can look sculptural and graceful, but residents who live among wind turbines often have mixed and divergent feelings. NPR's David Baron talks to one family in upstate New York that's been divided by the impact of a local wind farm.
ORISE: The number of foreign students receiving doctorates in science and engineering from US universities and staying in this country historically has increased. In recent years, however, stay rates peaked and then declined slightly, according to a new report issued by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE).
Stay Rates of Foreign Doctorate Recipients from U.S. Universities, 2005, documents a study in which tax records were used to estimate the proportion of foreign doctorate recipients from US universities who stayed in the US after graduation for any reason.
"In many fields of science and engineering, foreign students make up the majority of doctorate recipients," says ORISE report author Michael Finn. "Universities, research labs, and other high-tech employers have become dependent on these scientists and engineers."
"However, some of the actions taken to improve security after 9/11 were widely seen as having made it harder for foreign doctorate recipients to obtain visas," Finn said. "Also, there was concern that the increased restrictions made foreign scientists feel less welcome. In addition to security issues, the macroeconomic performance of the US economy may have been a factor as well. There was a weakness from 2000–2002 that may have contributed to the minor decline in the stay rate. This report indicates that the adverse impact on stay rates was quite small—the U.S. is still keeping about two-thirds."
Two-thirds (66 percent) of foreign citizens who received science or engineering doctorates from US universities in 2003 lived in the United States in 2005, the study found. The two-year stay rate had peaked at 71 percent in the early part of this decade; thus, the more recent 66 percent rate represents a slight decline in the stay rate of foreign doctorate recipients.
Among science and engineering disciplines, the highest stay rate was recorded for computer/electrical and electronic engineering. The stay rates in agricultural sciences, economics, and the other social sciences were the lowest, according to the report.
space.com:
NASA and Europe's space agency weigh plans for a Jupiter or Saturn mission.
LA Times: Fault-laced Southern California has a greater chance of a huge quake by 2038 than the North, researchers say.
Southern California stands a greater chance of a huge temblor in the next 30 years than Northern California, according to a statewide earthquake forecast released Monday.
New York Times: For a decade, the scientists have argued that the storied liner went down fast after hitting an iceberg because the ship’s builder used substandard rivets that popped their heads and let tons of icy seawater rush in. More than 1,500 people died. When the safety of the rivets was first questioned 10 years ago, the builder ignored the accusation and said it did not have an archivist who could address the issue. Now, historians say new evidence uncovered in the archive of the builder, Harland and Wolff, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, settles the argument and finally solves the riddle of one of the most famous sinkings of all time. The company says the findings are deeply flawed.
Nature: Eruption in 1600 may have plunged the globe into cold climate chaos.
New York Times: Whom can we trust to do hard-headed calculations to prove that a scientific experiment will not lead to the end of the world?
space.com: Putin announces new Russian space launchpad, booster rocket.
LA Times: The rock believed responsible for a mass extinction 65 million years ago was much smaller than previously thought, scientists say.
The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs may not have been the whopper scientists thought.
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