NPR: In rural Ohio, researchers are testing a new bridge made of plastic. Plastic bridges offer low maintenance and long life, but there are questions about how long plastic can stand up to sunlight, changing temperatures and stress.
Science: Say you’re a physicist with a strong mathematical background, eager for intellectual stimulation and pining for some challenging problems to solve. You could seek a faculty gig and spend the next couple of decades developing a theory of everything. Or you could become a “quant” (short for “quantitative analyst”) and use advanced mathematics to help move mountains–of cash–through the world’s financial systems.
The Guardian: Should science communicators restrict themselves in their public utterances to their own subject, or are they right to join in with other social commentators in the public arena to opine on wider societal issues such as ethics or faith?
USA Today: On Nov. 19-20, the ITER Council, with representatives from China, the European Union, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the United States, met at the Chateau de Cadarache in France to visit the ITER site and review a progress report on the project, projected to cost $10 Billion Euros (about $12.5 Billion at today’s exchange rates) over its 30-year lifetime. Representatives signed $518 million worth of agreements to go ahead and buy magnet and vacuum equipment for the project.
But all is not well for ITER. “To keep momentum, ITER needs the collective efforts and continued support from its members, laying the foundations for a new model of global scientific collaboration,” said Kaname Ikeda, director-general of the ITER Organization, in a statement at the meeting.
The bad news comes from the United States which, “cannot live up to our commitments” to ITER, the Energy Department’s Gene Nardella told an advisory committee earlier this month. Congress allocated only $20.5 million for the project, just enough for staffing, instead of a requested $214 million for 2009. A National Research Council panel in June warned, “The lack of funding stability will make it difficult for the U.S. to effectively participate in ITER, and ultimately, to access and thus benefit from the valuable scientific and technical knowledge to be gained from the facility.”
New York Times: A concatenation of puzzling results from an alphabet soup of satellites and experiments has led a growing number of astronomers and physicists to suspect that they are getting signals from a shadow universe of dark matter that makes up a quarter of creation but has eluded direct detection until now.
Science: Chinese researchers visiting the US for workshops and conferences are being snared by a recent slowdown in the processing of US visas for foreign scientists says Richard Stone.
Procedures instituted after the 11 September 2001 attacks require the US Department of Homeland Security, CIA, FBI, and other agencies to vet most scientists from countries whose citizens must obtain visas to enter the United States. In 2003, visa delays prompted scientific societies to warn of an erosion of U.S. competitiveness if top foreign talent were to eschew travel to the United States. By last year, U.S. security agencies had managed to whittle average visa-processing time for scientists from 7 weeks to 3 weeks.
It has since climbed back up to 8 weeks. “We are quite concerned about the possibility of seeing all the ground we made lost,” says Amy Scott, assistant vice president for federal relations at the Association of American Universities in Washington, D.C.
The Associated Press: NASA is scrapping a controversial piece of hardware from its next-generation Mars rover that would have allowed the spacecraft to store rock fragments in a mini-basket for a future mission.
Nature: Jet-setting scientists are responsible for substantial greenhouse gas emissions.
The Times of South Africa: An internationally acclaimed water-resource expert has been suspended from the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research after sounding the alarm bell on a looming water crisis in South Africa.
New York Times: The Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid, will not arrive in showrooms until late 2010. But it is already straining under the weight of an entire company.