Daily Archives: November 16, 2012

‘Fiscal cliff’ threatens R&D programs

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Obama seeks agreement with lawmakers to lift automatic spending cuts and tax increases set for new year.

By David Kramer

Reaching agreement with Congress to avoid the fiscal cliff—across-the-board tax increases and spending cuts—is critical to prevent cuts to investments in basic research and education, President Obama told reporters this week. Touting his plan to raise taxes on Americans who make more than $250 000, Obama said at a 14 November press conference that the automatic budget cuts and tax increases that are due to take effect on 2 January can be avoided in a way “that does not hurt middle-class families; that does not hurt our seniors; doesn’t hurt families with disabled kids; allows us to continue to invest in those things that make us grow like basic research and education, [and] helping young people afford going to college.”

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) estimates that federal R&D budgets would decline $12.1 billion in fiscal year 2013 if the spending cuts mandated by last year’s Budget Control Act take effect. By agency, the Department of Defense would lose $6.9 billion in R&D; National Institutes of Health, $2.4 billion; Department of Energy, $972 million; NSF, $456 million; NASA, $763 million; and Department of Agriculture, $189 million, according to the analysis.

Matthew Hourihan, director of the R&D budget and policy program for AAAS, said as many as 19 states could lose $1 billion or more in federal R&D funding over the next five years if the mandatory cuts, also known as sequestration, proceed. Such reductions would bring the total R&D spending of the major federal funding agencies down to a level last seen in 2002 (measured in constant 2012 dollars). Through FY 2017, annual mandatory R&D cuts would total $57.5 billion.

Subra Suresh, NSF director, told a House hearing on 15 November that the sequestration would lower NSF’s $7 billion current year funding by 8.2%, which would result in 1000 fewer new grants and could impact thousands of scientists. The cutbacks would also discourage young people from pursuing science studies, he added.

Steven Fluharty, vice provost for research at the University of Pennsylvania, warned that sequestration would cost $50 million to $60 million in lost research grants for the university next year, and it would result in the layoff of at least 1000 employees and postdocs at the institution. “Some research programs will be halted on the cusp on some breakthrough; that is undeniable,” Fluharty told a 14 November AAAS Capitol Hill briefing.

Orlando Auciello, distinguished fellow at Argonne National Laboratory, said some DOE laboratories have already reduced their laboratory-directed R&D (LDRD) budgets by 5% to 10% in anticipation of the sequestration. The LDRD programs, he noted, are the source of support for a disproportionate number of the national labs’ postdocs.

Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ) called the fiscal cliff “an artificial crisis.” Lawmakers, he told the AAAS briefing, should be focusing on “doing things instead of talking about what we can’t do.” The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has shown that investments in R&D do produce jobs in the short term. “Money spent on R&D, even borrowed money, pays back big,” Holt declared.

Rainforest katydids’ hearing mechanism resembles that of mammals

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Science News: The auditory mechanisms of a South American rainforest katydid have been found to be remarkably similar to those of mammals, according to Daniel Robert of the UK’s University of Bristol and colleagues, whose x-ray microtomography study appeared online today in Science. A katydid’s ears sit below its knees, with a drum on each side of the leg. Similar to mammals’ three-stage processing system, katydids “hear” because their eardrums sense sound waves, which cause a small plate on each drum to vibrate. The vibration sends ripples through a liquid-filled chamber inside the leg, where detector cells sense the frequencies. The researchers found, however, that not only does the katydid ear do much the same job as a mammal’s ear, it is much smaller and simpler. An understanding of its design could help researchers develop miniature hearing aids for humans.

Curiosity provides details about weather patterns on Mars

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BBC: The Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) onboard Curiosity was damaged when the rover landed, but that hasn’t stopped it from gathering Martian weather data. Manuel de la Torre Juarez of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, says that, although Curiosity hasn’t taken any pictures of the dust devils characteristic of Martian wind storms, it appears that some may have passed over the rover. More significantly, Curiosity has detected a general east-to-west wind pattern inside Gale Crater. Because of the rover’s location near the mountain at the center of the crater, the scientists had expected a north-westerly wind. REMS has also recorded daily cycles of air pressure rising and falling as the Sun warms the air in the crater. The longer-term trend is a general increase in air pressure as the season changes from spring to summer. As the southern ice cap melts and evaporates, it adds more carbon dioxide to the air, thickening the atmosphere. One of the more interesting observations is that as the air pressure increases, the level of solar radiation at the surface decreases.

New look at Einstein’s brain

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Nature: More than half a century after Albert Einstein died in 1955, researchers are still studying his unusual brain. Within hours of Einstein’s death, pathologist Thomas Harvey removed his brain and took dozens of black-and-white photographs of the whole and partially dissected organ. Although over the years numerous groups have studied various aspects of it, a team of researchers at Florida State University in Tallahassee has recently analyzed 12 of Harvey’s original photos and compared them with those of 85 brains described in other studies. According to the paper by Dean Falk and colleagues published online today in the journal Brain, “Einstein’s brain has an extraordinary prefrontal cortex,” among other features. That could account for Einstein’s unusual talent for abstract thinking.

US energy grid is vulnerable to attack

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New Scientist: The National Research Council has only just released a report written in 2007 that warns of the vulnerability of the US power grid to terrorist attack. The report also indicates that such an attack could be devastating because it could leave large areas of the country without power for weeks or months. The major weaknesses of the power grid are its overall size, the lack of security at many of its facilities, the age of many systems, and the grid’s already overstressed state. All of those concerns suggest that failures could cascade through the system as it tries to compensate for damage. The report also indicates that weaknesses may exist in the computer systems at many facilities. But because the report was written five years ago, recent cyberthreats such as the Stuxnet virus, which targeted Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2010, are not examined in depth in the report. To improve the strength and security of the grid, the report suggests investing in mobile backup transformers, updating facilities and equipment, and funding more research into the nature of the grid.