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Science Progress: When Mary Ann Mason was graduate dean at the University of California, Berkeley, a frequent question she heard from women graduate students was "when is a good time to have a baby?"

For women in academic science careers, the conventional wisdom was that waiting until she had achieved tenure was the best approach.

In 1985, the national average age of scientists winning tenure was 36. But by 2003, it was over 39.

"So it's increasingly poor advice to wait until you get to tenure," she says.

Her belief is that women researchers should be able to have children whenever they want, and her new report, co-authored with colleagues Marc Goulden and Karie Frasch, explains the work-family policies that are driving women out of the academic pipeline.

Their data, taken from extensive surveys of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers within the University of California system, shows that work-life issues, and particularly decisions about when to get married and when to have children, account for the most significant loss of academic scientists in the pipeline between PhD and tenured positions.

"The leak is almost entirely, or least due primarily to family formation," said Mason, who is currently a professor and co-faculty director of the Berkeley Law Center on Health, Economic, and Family Security at the UC Berkeley.

Science Progress has a podcast discussing these issues with the authors of the study.

Science: The two great ice sheets—Greenland's and Antarctica's—are closely monitored for ice loss.

Surveys of ice-sheet volume made from planes and satellites have quantified these losses, but those assessments have been spotty in time, space, or both.

Now the latest analysis of the most comprehensive, essentially continuous monitoring of the ice sheets shows that the losses have not eased in the past few years. More ominously, losses from both Greenland and Antarctica appear to have accelerated during the past 7 years.

Washingtonpost.com: A tool developed by the Idaho Department of Water Resources and the University of Idaho is changing the face of water management and conservation by efficiently offering specific measurements of the water consumed across a large region or single field.

Using surface temperature readings from government satellites, air temperature, and a system of algorithms, the new method lets officials measure how much water is "consumed" on a certain piece of land through evapotranspiration.

Evapotranspiration is a combination of the evaporation of water into the atmosphere and the water vapor released by plants through respiration—basically, a measurement of the water that leaves the land for the atmosphere, not water that is diverted or pumped onto land but then returned quickly to the water table or river for other users.

Science News: An oceanographic survey has discovered a 1,400-meter-tall plume rising from the seafloor off the coast of California. Water samples taken at the site, about 32 kilometers northwest of Cape Mendocino, indicate that the feature isn’t mineral-rich water spewing from a hydrothermal vent, but researchers aren’t yet sure exactly what the feature is made of.

On 13 August, the John N. Cobb was retired in Seattle, Washington, after 58 years of service. The ship conducted fishery studies off the coast of Alaska and was reportedly kept running with parts scavenged from nautical museums.

Science: A group of distinguished former government officials (Mark Schaefer, D. James Baker, John H. Gibbons, Charles G. Groat, Donald Kennedy, Charles F. Kennel, David Rejeski) argue in Science magazine that organizational changes must be made at the federal level to align the public institutional infrastructure to address the unprecedented environmental and economic challenges in the decades ahead such as climate change.

The most pressing organizational change that is required they say, is the establishment of an independent Earth Systems Science Agency formed by merging the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).