Recently in Science policy and politics Category

Science: The US Coast Guard icebreaker Healy, which works most of the year for the scientific community, was about to head to dry dock at the end of its 2011 run when it was called back into action. A freak storm in November left the Alaska settlement of Nome icebound, and the Healy helped break through almost 300 miles of ice so that a Russian fuel tanker could make a delivery to the town's icebound residents. The dramatic rescue may cause problems for researchers planning to go out on the ship in 2012, however. The Healy is now behind schedule for its annual maintenance, which could delay its return to sea by as much as 4–8 weeks. The Coast Guard is currently considering its options, including whether to reschedule the scientific teams or seek extra funding to shorten the ship's time in dry dock.

Nature: Research universities in Japan are starting to look to the West and its philanthropic tradition to help ease their monetary difficulties. Although funded by the government, Japan's universities have become cash starved, writes David Cyranoski for Nature. Recently, Japan's internationally known Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe was offered some $7.5 million from the Kavli Foundation in Oxnard, California. However, Japanese law prevented the IPMU from accepting the full amount. So the Kavli Foundation will instead manage the money for the institute, doling it out in smaller amounts to pay for expenses that public funds don't cover. New laws enacted last year regarding nonprofit organizations in Japan, along with the IPMU's success, may encourage more Japanese universities to seek external funding through endowments.

Physics Today: Today the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted in favor of granting a construction license for two nuclear reactors to be built in Georgia. As reported in the New York Times yesterday, the license will be the first to be issued since the Three Mile Island accident in 1978. In anticipation, the Southern Company had already invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the project. Although natural gas prices have gone down in the US and no tax has yet been imposed on carbon emissions, proponents had pointed out that market and regulatory factors can change. Antinuclear groups, such as the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, tried to sue to block the license because of the risks involved, including potential cost overruns, regulatory problems, and radioactive waste management issues. The reactor design, Westinghouse's AP1000, is new. Once built, the reactors are supposed to be able to withstand earthquakes, plane crashes, and electricity outages and be less vulnerable to operator error.

Nature: In a Nature opinion column, Ryan Meyer, a science integration fellow at the California Ocean Science Trust in Oakland, discusses the revamping of a government agency's strategic plan. For the past 20 years, the US Global Change Research Program has spent more than $30 billion on climate change studies. Although the program has improved our understanding of climate systems, Meyer writes, it has been less successful at providing decision makers with useful information. So the program has added three more objectives: to inform decisions, to sustain assessments, and to communicate and educate. Meyer points out that problems may arise regarding the reallocation of funds among the new priorities and that there may be tradeoffs between the increasing complexity of climate models and the need of policymakers for simplicity. Nevertheless, he applauds the program administrators for "taking such an important conceptual step in the right direction."

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.

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.

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.

Financial Times: Madhavan Nair, former head of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), has been banned from government employment because of allegations that he was involved in the underpriced leasing of space spectrum to the private sector, write James Fontanella-Khan and James Lamont for the Financial Times. Nair, who supervised 25 space missions during his tenure from 2003 to 2009, earned international recognition for his efforts to put India's space program on a par with those of China and Japan. Since 2009, when he retired from ISRO, he has served as president of the Paris-based International Academy of Astronautics. Regarding the allegations, Nair claimed he was not given any opportunity to defend himself, and one space expert suggested that they were politically motivated. No criminal charges have been filed.

New York Times: As climate scientists increasingly find themselves under attack and facing litigation for their stance on human-induced global warming, a nonprofit group and monetary fund have been set up to help them fight their legal battles. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) offers aid and advice to government whistleblowers and scientists working on environmental issues. Recently it became affiliated with the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, which was set up last fall to raise money to defend climate scientists involved in litigation and to provide lawyers representing scientists with information about past cases and strategies. In his New York Times Q&A, Andrew Revkin interviews Jeff Ruch, executive director of PEER, about the alliance of the two organizations.

Nature: Although China is second only to the US in number of scientific papers produced, the quality of its research needs to improve, writes Peng Gong of Tsinghua University in China and the University of California, Berkeley. In his Nature opinion piece, Gong maintains that the problem is due in part to Chinese culture, which has been heavily influenced by the philosophies of Confucius and Zhuangzi, who encouraged isolation and self-sufficiency. Consequently, Chinese academics and institutions tend not to collaborate, which leads to repetition and redundancy as investigators purchase similar pieces of equipment and do similar types of data processing. And because everyone wants to lead, no one steps up to fill supporting roles. Gong recommends several steps to resolve those problems. The Chinese educational system must begin to nurture the scientific spirit and encourage curiosity. Also, Chinese research institutions and government agencies should divide projects among people with different specializations. Finally, Chinese scientists should be encouraged to participate in international projects, and outstanding foreign scientists should be invited to work in China.

New Scientist: After decades of fighting over the teaching of evolution in classrooms, US science education advocates are bracing themselves for the next battle—concerning the teaching of human-caused climate change. Over the past few years, several states, including Texas, Louisiana, and South Dakota, have introduced legislation that requires teachers to include the views of climate change skeptics. "Climate change education is kind of where evolution education was 30 years ago," says Steven Newton, programs and policy director for the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), a nonprofit organization based in Oakland, California. Whereas creationism is a religious belief, however, climate change denial is mainly political and therefore may be harder to fight in court.

Science: Although the Obama administration has proposed to move the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from the US Department of Commerce to the Department of the Interior, it looks unlikely that the move will be approved by Congress, writes David Malakoff for Science. The proposal, part of President Obama’s plan to reorganize and streamline the federal government, is drawing mixed reactions from former staff, members of Congress, and outside organizations. Some supporters say it would allow several agencies with weather, geographical, and geological responsibilities to work together under one agency. Among those voicing objections, however, are environmental groups that worry this may not be a good time to shake things up. According to Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, “The move could erode the capabilities and mute the voice of the government's primary agency for protecting our oceans and the ecosystems and economies that depend on them."

Toronto Star: The Ontario government has cut Can$42 million in university research grants from its budget in order to meet “current fiscal challenges.” The money would have been used to support research in such areas as clean technologies and the bio-economy. In addition, soon after winning the 6 October election, Premier Dalton McGuinty downsized his cabinet and folded the ministry of research and innovation into the ministry of economic development. “We are in an era now of prioritization and rationalization,” said Economic Development Minister Brad Duguid. Ironically, McGuinty has also launched a 30% tuition rebate, totaling Can$423 million, for community college and undergraduate university students.

New York Times: Iran has announced that it is about to start production at its second major uranium enrichment site, writes David Sanger for the New York Times. Iran maintains that it is not seeking to produce weapons but to find an alternative energy source to oil. Whether or not that is true, the plant’s opening does not significantly affect estimates of how long it could take Iran to produce a nuclear weapon. The country has already produced enough fuel to manufacture about four weapons, but only if the fuel goes through further enrichment, which would take at least six months to a year, say nuclear experts. “Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No. But we know that they’re trying to develop a nuclear capability. And that’s what concerns us,” said US Defense secretary Leon Panetta.

Nature: Although it has long been assumed that the US favors applied over basic science, the opposite turns out to be true, writes Daniel Sarewitz for Nature. Over the past 15 years, agencies that serve public goals rather than advance science—the US Geological Survey, for example—have experienced minimal budgetary growth. Yet, over the same period, government funding for research doubled, with most of that money going to the National Institutes of Health and NSF. Sarewitz claims the funding allocation may be because advocacy for research funding comes mostly from the high-prestige frontiers of science and the institutions associated with such research. Nevertheless, addressing social problems, such as preventing and preparing for natural disasters, is just as important. To ensure that the scientific enterprise continues to meet challenges to public well-being, he says, science advocacy should seek a balance between the fundamental-science agencies and the mission agencies that link science to the public good.

Daily Mail: A plutonium-powered pilotless aircraft, Aviatr, has been designed to fly around Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. It would take three-dimensional photos of the moon’s surface, which is hidden from Earth’s view by Titan’s cloudy atmosphere, and even try to land on it. Although a rival balloon project has also been proposed, Aviatr’s designers maintain that the plane would do the best job because its altitude could be controlled more precisely and its plutonium-powered generator could keep Aviatr on the day side of Titan to make the most of its photographing time. With a projected cost of $715 million, Aviatr did not make NASA’s last round of funding. However, Jason Barnes, a scientist at the University of Idaho and one of the craft’s designers, remains optimistic that it will make the next round.

BBC: Yet another Soyuz rocket launch has failed. After liftoff from Russia’s Plesetsk spaceport on Friday, 23 December, the Soyuz-2 vehicle was unable to put a communications satellite into orbit. It is one of several failed attempts this year, including Phobus-Grunt in November and the Progress cargo spacecraft, which was to take supplies to astronauts aboard the International Space Station, in August. Russia’s problems could severely impact the US, which depends on Russian rockets to carry astronauts to the International Space Station, writes Will Englund for the Washington Post. In his overview article, Englund notes how Russia has tripled its science spending over the past 10 years, “but innovation is losing out to exhaustion, corruption and cronyism.” Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia is still struggling to bounce back.

Nature: Spain’s Ministry of Science has been cut by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, a member of the People’s Party. Rajoy had pledged to reduce the number of government ministries from 15 to 12. Responsibility for science and research will now be the purview of Luis de Guindos, the minister of economy and competition. The Ministry of Science was created in 2000, under a People’s Party government, but fell under a joint ministry with education from 2004 to 2008, then again became a dedicated ministry from 2008 to 2011.

Science: The director of the US National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, was forced to retract an email he sent his staff over the weekend, writes Jocelyn Kaiser. In the email he announced that President Obama had signed a 2012 spending bill, which, among other things, would establish a new center Collins has been promoting—the National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS). In reality, what the president signed was a continuing resolution; Obama is not expected to sign the spending bill until later this week. Many felt Collins's premature email was indicative of the entire project, which Collins is said to have rushed through without adequate discussion. The creation of NCATS will mean the dismantling of another NIH center, the National Center for Research Resources, which Collins admits in his email has had a “rich history.” For the many critics of the reorganization, says Kaiser, the memo "rubbed salt in their wounds."

BBC: Canada announced that it will formally withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol. Peter Kent, the country's minister of the environment, said that meeting Canada's obligations under Kyoto would cost $13.6 billion. He added that greenhouse emissions would continue to rise globally regardless of Canada's actions because the US and China aren't covered by the agreement. He described the agreement just reached in Durban, South Africa, in more positive terms, saying it represents "the way forward" for international cooperation on climate change. The Durban agreement states that talks on a new and legally binding agreement covering all countries will begin in 2012 and end by 2015.

Science: Arun Majumdar, founding director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), may soon become undersecretary for the US Department of Energy (DOE). Although Majumdar has been acting undersecretary since March, the Obama administration did not officially nominate him until November. The confirmation process is expected to take several months, althoughhe appears to have strong bipartisan support after his Senate confirmation hearing yesterday. In the meantime, there is speculation about whether Majumdar will also retain his position at ARPA-E or whether someone else will be nominated to head that agency.

Bloomberg Businessweek: Delegates at the United Nations climate change conference in Durban, South Africa, have expressed frustration with what has become a hallmark of the annual negotiations: the continued standoff between the US and China. The US position is that no new global climate deal is possible before 2020, and it will not begin talks until China, India, and other large emerging economies agree to be equally bound by any legal agreement. In the meantime, US negotiators say, countries should focus on the voluntary emissions-cutting agreement reached in 2010. China maintains that due to its rapid economic growth, it can't be bound by the same emissions standards as advanced industrialized nations, although the country is willing to enter a legally binding agreement at the end of the decade when current, voluntary programs expire.

New York Times: In a 1974 treaty with the US, South Korea agreed not to enrich uranium or reprocess spent nuclear fuel. Those technologies can be used to make nuclear weapons, but they can also be used to create fuel for nuclear power plants. South Korea is asking that that agreement be revised, because it needs to reprocess the spent fuel that's accumulating from nuclear reactors. The country also wants to meet 60% of its electricity needs with nuclear power by 2030 and sees reprocessing and enrichment as a way of securing fuel supplies for its expanding nuclear industry. Although the US supports a revised agreement, preventing the spread of uranium enrichment has been a major emphasis of US policy since 2004, and the US has required countries interested in civilian nuclear cooperation to renounce any right to uranium enrichment that they have as signatories of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

Nature: The European Commission has proposed that funding for ITER, the international effort to build a fusion test reactor, and for the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) Earth-observation project be separated from the next general budget for 2014–20. The two projects would be supported via new intergovernmental organizations funded by European Union member states, with each member state required to contribute according to its gross national income. The commission argued that the arrangement would reduce the main EU budget's exposure to the large cost overruns common with large science projects. While ITER has experienced major overruns—going from a projected €5 billion budget in 2006 to €15 billion, GMES has stayed within its budget. The proposal represents potential risk for both projects, but for GMES particularly, as it is due to begin launching its satellites in 2013. Without guaranteed funding and governance, that won't be possible.

Guardian: Hundreds of scientific experiments are being dropped by British universities because of budget shortfalls at ISIS, one of the UK's major research facilities, writes Ian Sample for the Guardian. Built in the early 1980s at a cost of some $625 million, ISIS is a pulsed neutron and muon source used to probe the structure and microscopic processes of condensed matter. But it currently operates at only two-thirds capacity because the UK government has balked at paying the approximately $4.5 million in electrical and other miscellaneous annual costs to keep it running. As a result, ISIS receives twice as many applications as it can accommodate, and many scientists have given up applying. "The damage to the research base in UK universities across a number of disciplines is out of all proportion to the cost saving," said Jon Goff at the University of London. "The saving comes mainly from electricity costs, and it equates in financial value to a single research grant to one group in a university. For this we lose a third of the science. . . . This substantially affects the international competitiveness of UK research."

New York Times: Delegates from 194 nations gathered today in Durban, South Africa, for the opening of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Topics to be discussed include the differing obligations of industrialized and developing nations, the question of who will pay to help poor nations adapt, the urgency of protecting tropical forests, the goal of reducing global carbon dioxide emissions by 2020, the need to rapidly develop and deploy clean energy technology, and, most important, the future of the Kyoto Protocol, writes John Broder for the New York Times. But political problems threaten to derail the talks, according to Rajendra K. Pachauri, director of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Some of those problems can be blamed on the US, which has not shown leadership on this issue, said Alden Meyer, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, to NPR's Richard Harris. The Obama administration is hamstrung by the current economic crisis and by Republicans' widespread denial of human-induced climate change.

New York Times: Another batch of stolen emails from climate scientists was posted yesterday by the hacker or group of hackers responsible for Climategate two years ago. Involving the same scientists and many of the same issues, some of them also carried a similar tone: “catty remarks by the scientists, often about papers written by others in the field,” write Justin Gillis and Leslie Kaufman for the New York Times. The release of the emails, which is intended to cast doubt on the integrity of leading climate scientists and of climate research in general, comes less than a week before the United Nations climate summit in Durban, South Africa, which starts on 28 November. “It smacks of desperation,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA.

Nature: Anne Glover, a molecular and cell biologist who is currently serving as Scotland's chief scientific adviser, will become the European Union's first chief scientific adviser. Although the identity of the nominee has been announced, key aspects of her job remain undefined, writes Nature's Natasha Gilbert. In particular, it's not clear how much real influence Glover will have over science policy or which EU office she will belong to. The position of chief scientific adviser was created two years ago. Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, the EU research commissioner, blamed the delay in filling the position on the financial crisis.

Chronicle of Higher Education: The so-called supercommittee of 12 congressional Democrats and 12 congressional Republicans admitted yesterday that it had failed to carry out its charge: to reach agreement on a series of deficit-reducing measures. The failure triggers automatic spending cuts, which include a $3.54 billion reduction in the budget of the Department of Education. If the automatic spending cuts go through as scheduled in 2013, student-aid programs will lose $134 million, which will affect some 1.3 million students. The Chronicle's Kelly Field reports that the cuts to Education are especially severe because they come on top of cuts imposed in 2011 on career and technical education and college preparatory programs.

Washington Post: Congress has refused a request by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to establish a National Climate Service, even though no new funding was required, writes Brian Vastag for the Washington Post. According to the NOAA website, the climate service would have provided “a single, reliable and authoritative source for climate data, information and decision-support services to help individuals, businesses, communities and governments make smart choices in anticipation of a climate changed future.” Demand for climate information has been growing. Between 2009 and 2010, the amount of climate data retrieved from NOAA websites shot up 86%, and climate-related phone calls and emails jumped from 26 000 to 30 000. But several House Republicans believe that the climate service “could become little propaganda sources instead of a science source,” according to Representative Andy Harris (R-MD). Christine McEntee, executive director of the American Geophysical Union, expressed her disappointment in the decision: “We think it’s very unfortunate. Limiting access to this kind of climate information won’t make climate change go away.”

Nature: Extreme weather, such as the 2010 Russian heat wave or the drought in the horn of Africa, will become more frequent and severe as the planet warms, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in a report released Friday, writes Quirin Schiermeier for Nature. The frequency and magnitude of warm temperature extremes will increase, and those of cold extremes will decrease. But how climate change will affect rainfall, flood risk, and storminess remains to be seen. The report, which lists a variety of adaptation strategies such as early-warning systems and improved building codes, is also meant to inform the United Nations’ upcoming climate talks in South Africa.

Guardian: A test of a UK geoengineering project has been postponed pending further discussion of its implications. The Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (SPICE) project, which was conceived in March 2010, would inject particles into Earth’s atmosphere to try to cool the planet and mitigate climate change. In mid-September 2011, SPICE announced the UK’s first field trial. However, the trial was postponed later that month by the project’s scientific advisers, who say further public discussion is needed. Among the objections to the plan is the charge that such a project would “deflect political and scientific action away from reducing greenhouse-gas emissions,” write Phil Macnaghten, chair of the advisory panel, and Richard Owen, architect of the project's governance process, who describe in Nature the first attempt to govern a climate-engineering research project.

BBC: China’s Shenzhou 8 spacecraft returned to Earth today, after a 17-day mission in which it performed the nation’s first docking maneuvers with China’s mini space lab, Tiangong 1. Beijing sees the dockings as the next phase in its step-by-step approach to acquiring the skills of human spaceflight operations, writes Jonathan Amos for the BBC. China aims to launch a manned mission in 2012. By 2020 it hopes to start building a 60-ton space station, considerably smaller than the 400-ton International Space Station but a remarkable achievement for a single country nevertheless.

Science: Francesco Profumo has been named Italy’s new Minister for Education, Universities, and Research, writes Marta Paterlini for Science. Profumo, who is provost of the Polytechnic University of Turin, was also recently named president of the country’s National Research Council (CNR). "He has a deep knowledge of university, research, and industry. I am sure he has the right skills to try, at least, to reform a system that is craving a fair evaluation and recruitment based on merit," said Adriano De Maio, president of the European Centre for Nanomedicine in Milan. A press release stated that Profumo is "honored" by the new assignment, which he will "embrace with humility and a spirit of service."

Guardian: Depleted uranium (DU) is attractive for use in bullets and shells because its density, at 19 g/cm³, is so high. Despite its name, DU retains some radioactivity and is chemically toxic—which makes its use in munitions controversial. Nick Harvey, the number-two official at Britain's Ministry of Defense, has now admitted that he misled members of the British parliament on whether a ministry review had concluded that DU munitions are allowed under the Geneva Conventions. In an apology to MPs, Harvey admitted that the review had not been requested and did not exist. The status of DU munitions in the Geneva Conventions hinges on the question of environmental damage. As the Guardian's Rob Edwards notes in his story, in 1998 the UK government ratified a protocol of the Geneva Conventions that stipulates that all weapons must be reviewed on whether they cause "widespread and severe damage to the natural environment."

BBC: Australian environmentalists won a victory with the Senate’s approval of the Clean Energy Act. The plan—part of a global policy to combat climate change—will force the country’s 500 worst-polluting companies to pay a tax on their carbon emissions. Hardest hit by the tax will be mining and energy companies, airlines, and steel makers. Consumers can also expect higher fuel bills as a result. Nevertheless, Australia’s government hopes that the legislation will force advances in renewable energy technologies and wean the country away from fossil fuels.

NPR: Over the past half century, plutonium-238 has powered such NASA robotic spacecraft as Voyager 1 and 2, Cassini, and New Horizons, which have traveled to Jupiter, Saturn, and beyond. Although not the same plutonium isotope that is used for bombs, plutonium-238 was only produced in the US during the cold war years. Now the US, whose supply of ²³⁸Pu made it the only country to have sent spacecraft beyond Mars, is running out of the fuel and has not made plans to produce more. In the past, NASA, which uses ²³⁸Pu, has split the bill with the Department of Energy, which makes and handles the material. But Congress is balking at allocating the requested funding to DOE. Little time remains: The supply is expected to run out by 2022, and experts predict that production of new plutonium won’t be fully up and running before 2020.

Washington Post: "Iran’s government has mastered the critical steps needed to build a nuclear weapon," writes Joby Warrick for the Washington Post. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, documents and other records show that a former Soviet weapons scientist and experts in Pakistan and North Korea have provided crucial knowledge and technology. Despite having claimed to cease weapons-related research as of 2003, Iran has apparently continued a secret research program that was more ambitious, more organized, and more successful than commonly suspected. The IAEA is due to release a full report of its findings later this week.

Comcast Xfinity: Global carbon dioxide output in 2010 increased by 6% over that in 2009, according to the US Department of Energy. It is a "monster" increase, said Gregg Marland, a professor of geology at Appalachian State University, who has helped calculate DOE figures in the past. More than half of the increase in emissions can be attributed to extra pollution in China and the US. Interestingly, the US did not ratify the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which sought to limit greenhouse gas emissions. The developed countries that did have reduced their emissions about 8% below 1990 levels. Developing countries are also contributing to the problem, as their economies grow and improve. Greenhouse gas emissions from developing countries may already be surpassing those from developed countries.

Baltimore City Paper: Yesterday the US Senate approved full funding of the James Webb Space Telescope through its 2018 launch. As reported earlier, the JWST project, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, has been plagued with cost overruns and delays. Although the Republican-dominated House of Representatives had proposed cutting its funding, Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) has proven its biggest advocate and pushed hard to keep it in the Senate's version of the budget. “The Webb Telescope supports 1200 jobs and will lead to the kind of innovation and discovery that have made America great,” she said. “It will inspire America’s next generation of scientists and innovators that will have the new ideas that lead to new products and new jobs.” The next hurdle will be keeping JWST funding alive as part of reconciling the Senate and House versions of the 2012 budget.

New York Times: In addition to solar panels and wind turbines, China is setting its sights on becoming a force in yet another budding environment-related industry: desalinating seawater, writes Michael Wines for the New York Times. Its $4 billion Beijiang Power and Desalination Plant is a state-of-the-art, state-owned facility located southeast of Beijing. Although it’s a money-losing proposition—the desalted water costs twice as much to produce as it sells for—China hopes to use the plant to strengthen its expertise in desalination, learn how to trim production costs, and ease the chronic water shortage in nearby Tianjin. Despite extensive recycling and conservation programs, many parts of China are experiencing water shortages. And according to the Asia Water Project, a business information organization, by 2030 China’s demand for fresh water is expected to grow 63%—more than anywhere else in the world.

New Scientist: As a potential cost-cutting measure, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has proposed recycling parts of dead satellites that are in graveyard orbit. The agency estimates that billions of dollars’ worth of satellites, many of them retired due to obsolescence or failure, are currently orbiting Earth. DARPA’s Phoenix program would draw on diverse techniques, such as remote operating procedures and remote imaging, gleaned from non-space-related activities like surgery and offshore drilling, to harvest parts that could still be useful. A first test mission is planned for 2015 during which a robot would use remote sensing to collect parts and reconfigure them for a new purpose. However, old satellites are not necessarily just up for grabs—according to the Outer Space Treaty dating from the late 1960s, any object launched into space remains the property of the country that launched it.

Science: On 9 January 2012 Thomas Bogdan becomes president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), which manages NSF’s National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. Bogdan previously worked as a senior scientist at NCAR, whose nearly 600 scientists and engineers study severe weather, climate change, geomagnetic storms, and other environmental factors. Currently he is director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center. Bogdan will succeed current UCAR president Richard Anthes, who is retiring after 23 years.

Science: The work of Hermann Muller, who won the 1946 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and Curt Stern, with whom Muller collaborated over a period of years on several key studies, laid the foundation for present-day radiation safety regulations. Current understanding of radiation exposure risk is based on the linear no-threshold model, in which the effect of radiation is proportional to the dose, even at very low levels of exposure. In two recent papers, Edward Calabrese, a toxicologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, alleges that Muller and Stern downplayed evidence that low levels of radiation might be harmless and that Muller was being misleading in his Nobel acceptance speech when he stated that there is no safe level of radiation exposure. Critics have pointed out the possibility that Calabrese's own view may not be objective; some of his research—about 20%, according to Calabrese—is funded by chemical and nuclear industries. Calabrese has responded by saying that he is transparent about his sponsors and that he does not consult for them.

Los Angeles Times: Private commercial launch providers, such as Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX), may soon be able to compete with United Launch Alliance (ULA)—a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing—for launching national-security-related satellites into outer space. An agreement has been signed by several government agencies to establish the criteria, including detailed technical requirements and a successful launch record, for launching government payloads. On a related note, ULA is pushing for a five-year block buy of 40 of its rocket booster cores. The Government Accountability Office has raised several serious questions concerning the proposal, among them the possibility that such a block purchase could kill opportunities for competition by forcing the government to commit to more boosters than are actually needed.

Science: Several hundred scientists and students, many dressed in lab coats, gathered in Moscow's Pushkin Square on 13 October to protest procurement regulations and a funding freeze that they say are major obstacles to research. Russia's granting system operates through the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR) and the Russian Foundation for Humanities (RFRH), and the Russian government has frozen the budgets for both at 2010 levels until 2014. Protesters want the government to go back to the old policy, which gave RFBR 6% of the overall budget for civilian science, and RFRH 1%. They also demanded an overhaul of public procurement legislation, which severely limits the amount of equipment and reagents researchers can purchase each month, and they called for the clarification of funding criteria.

Guardian: For the Earthwatch annual debate, which takes place tomorrow in London at the Royal Geographical Society, five experts have been tapped to debate why their chosen topic should be the number one global priority to tackle over the next 40 years; audience members will then vote on the most compelling argument for support. The topics are food security, a zero-carbon future, protection of the oceans, education, and water scarcity. "By bringing together leading environmental thinkers and activists," said Earthwatch executive vice president Nigel Winser, "this event will give our audience an opportunity to consider some of these serious issues, and some possible solutions in an entertaining and thought-provoking format."

BBC: The March tsunami that damaged Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant prompted numerous governments around the world to reexamine their own plants and policies. Under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UK sent its chief nuclear inspector, Mike Weightman, on a fact-finding mission to Japan. After examining Japan’s and the UK’s facilities, he recently issued a report in which he found no fundamental weaknesses in the UK’s current licensing regime or safety principles. He did emphasize, however, that there is always room for improvement. Critics, including Greenpeace, claim that the report was rushed and did not fully cover the potential safety, environmental, and financial costs that new nuclear power stations could generate.

SciDev.net: What "green economy" means to different countries was discussed by representatives from more than 40 countries at a meeting held 3–4 October in New Delhi, India. Developed countries tend to focus on a low-carbon growth model, even it if involves high-end, costly technologies, whereas developing countries are more likely to aim for a sustainable, natural-resource-based model. Other topics included integrating food and energy security with green economy strategies and barring developed countries from imposing "green protectionism," or trade barriers, on goods whose production is based on high-carbon-emission technologies. The event was one of several that will lead up to the major United Nations conference on sustainable development, Rio+20, set to take place in June 2012.

Science: In preindustrial Europe, climate shifts were a statistically significant cause of social disturbance, war, migration, epidemics, famine, and nutritional status, write David Zhang of the University of Hong Kong and colleagues online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers analyzed socioeconomic, ecological, and demographic data from the years 1500–1800 to try to determine whether cause-and-effect relationships existed between some 14 variables, such as human height, the price of gold, tree-ring width, and temperature. The researchers found that extreme climate shifts influenced human society, primarily through agriculture. Falling crop yield can drive up the price of gold and cause inflation, for example. Whether the research is relevant for the present day remains to be seen. Halvard Buhaug of the Peace Research Institute Oslo points out that trade, technological development, and other processes of modern industrial society make us less sensitive to the climate.

SciDev.Net: Using remote sensing technologies, a group of researchers in India studied some 15 million hectares of underutilized agricultural land in South Asia in order to identify problem areas, such as land that is too wet or too dry for crops or land where natural resources have been depleted. By combining the data with resource-conserving technologies that include surface seeding and zero tillage—a method of growing crops without disturbing the soil—they found that crop yield could be significantly increased. Such studies will prove increasingly important as populations grow and less land and water are available for farming. The group’s results were recently published in Applied Geography.

Science: The US Department of Energy (DOE) is reshaping how it makes investments in developing better energy technologies in order to have a more coherent and productive transportation program. The new regime, which will be unveiled in the 2013 budget presented to Congress in February, will also have more resources devoted to electric car development. The reevaluation comes from DOE's first-ever Quadrennial Technology Review, which calls the current R&D spending allocation "a bit unbalanced," said DOE undersecretary for science Steven Koonin at a briefing held at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, DC.

Nature: A diplomatic cable published last month by the WikiLeaks website reveals that most of the Clean Development Mechanism projects in India should not have been certified, writes Quirin Schiermeier for Nature. The CDM, established under the Kyoto Protocol, allows rich countries to offset some of their carbon emissions by investing in climate-friendly projects in developing countries; verified projects earn carbon credits that count toward meeting rich nations’ carbon-reduction targets. The cable, written in 2008 by the US consulate in Mumbai to the US secretary of state, summarizes a discussion among officials that many CDM projects in India may not have reduced emissions beyond those that would have been achieved without foreign investment. If true, the revelation could cast doubt on the principle of carbon trading. In defense of the program, Martin Hession, head of global carbon markets at the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change and chairman of the CDM executive board, says that since 2008, the board has adopted more stringent guidelines. The European Union maintains that the carbon-trading system remains crucial in tackling climate change.

Science: In an editorial for Science, Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ) spells out the dichotomy that exists between those who insist that the federal government should scale back science funding because it’s ineffective and wasteful and those who believe that government funding of science can drive the economy forward. Holt sides with the latter; he emphasizes that science has proven to be a smart investment, albeit one whose benefits may not be tangible for a long time. In a recent interview on NPR, Holt delves further into what he calls “a kind of pessimism” that has set in in America today, where people have given up on the idea that the next generation will be better off than the current one and are instead lowering their sights and tightening their belts. He laments that “all the talk in Washington has been about cutting.” Although Holt acknowledges that science research will probably suffer its share of cuts in the next budget, he maintains that “investment in research makes good economic sense in the short term … but even more in the long term, in what it brings to our quality of life and our economy.”

Science: Last month NSF officials met with representatives from two California-based consortia that are interested in building the next US giant ground-based telescope. The two groups—one based at Caltech, which is designing the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), and one at the Carnegie Institution of Science, which is working on the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT)—may enter into competition for NSF funding of their projects. Such funding would provide more than just financial support: It could also be seen as a vote of confidence and could lead to the securing of additional funding from other partners, both public and private. However, there has been some confusion stemming from the language used in a Senate report that accompanied the proposed 2012 NSF budget; it's directed that the telescope be "developed ... on domestic soil." Because the TMT would be built in Hawaii and the GMT in Chile, some feel that the latter would be automatically disqualified. Such a qualification was not part of the National Academies' 2010 committee report, which had recommended the NSF face-off between the two projects, according to Roger Blandford of Stanford University, who chaired the committee.

Science: Physicist Jan Hendrik Schön had his PhD revoked by Germany's University of Konstanz because of the 2002 scandal in which he was found to have faked data in at least 17 research papers. Although an investigation turned up no evidence that Schön had committed misconduct while working on his PhD, university officials asked Schön to return his doctoral certificate based on a state law that allows degrees to be revoked when the recipient proves "unworthy." Schön successfully sued the university, and the university appealed. Last week the Administrative Court of Baden-Württemberg in Mannheim ruled in favor of the university. According to the judge, a doctorate degree indicates the recipient is capable of independent scientific research and understands the principles of good scientific practice. When a recipient has violated those basic principles, the title is no longer applicable.

BBC Newsnight: Defending themselves in an Italian courtroom this week are six scientists and one official, who are charged with manslaughter for failing to predict the 6.3-magnitude earthquake that struck L'Aquila in 2009. Members of the prosecution claim they are not putting science on trial; rather, they are questioning whether the seven individuals, who together constitute Italy's Commission of Grand Risks, did their jobs properly: whether they weighed all the risks and communicated them clearly to authorities. More than 5000 scientists worldwide have signed a letter protesting the trial, saying authorities should focus instead on earthquake protection and enforcing building codes.

Science: The Senate subcommittee that funds NSF, NASA, and the key research agencies within the Department of Commerce yesterday approved part of an appropriations bill that would reduce NSF's current budget by 2.4%, or $162 million. In imposing the cut, the Senate appropriators went further than their House counterparts, who passed a bill in July that would keep NSF's budget at this year's level of $6.86 billion. Whether the NSF budget cut makes it into the final Senate appropriations bill will depend on the full appropriations committee, which meets today.

Fox News: Ivar Giaever, who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics for his experiments on electron tunneling in superconductors, resigned on Tuesday from the American Physical Society over the society's official statement on climate change. He objects in particular to the statement's assertion that the evidence in favor of manmade climate change is "incontrovertible." Giaever's research encompasses condensed-matter physics and biophysics, but not climate science. The overwhelming majority of climate scientists support the view, embodied by APS's official statement on climate change, that human emissions of carbon dioxide are causing Earth's lower atmosphere to warm. A recently formed topical group within APS gives the society's members a forum for promoting "the advancement and diffusion of knowledge concerning the physics, measurement, and modeling of climate processes, within the domain of natural science and outside the domains of societal impact and policy, legislation and broader societal issues."

Nature: Canada's environment agency has informed researchers that it intends to severely cut back its network of ground-based ozone-monitoring stations because of budget constraints. As Nature's Quirin Schiermeier reports, the news shocked atmospheric scientists around the world. Data from the network's 17 stations helped to identify the widest-ever Arctic ozone hole: In March of this year, scientists reported that 40% of stratospheric ozone over the Arctic had been destroyed. Although instruments aboard satellites can also monitor ozone, experts say that ground-based measurements are essential for calibrating and validating space-based measurements. The decommissioning of Canada's ozone network will also entail the loss of 776 jobs.

BBC: The Marcoule nuclear site in southern France experienced an explosion earlier today, in which one person was killed and four injured. Because it was caused by a fire near a furnace, the accident was deemed industrial rather than nuclear by the plant’s owner, national electricity provider EDF. According to Interior Ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet, there was no leak of radiation, either inside or outside the plant. And none of the injured workers was contaminated by radiation, said officials. All of France’s 58 nuclear reactors have been put through stress tests in recent months, following the March disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which was hit by an earthquake and a tsunami.

Science: Turkey's government has decreed that the Turkish Academy of Sciences (known by its Turkish abbreviation TÜBA) will no longer choose all its own members. From now on, the government will directly appoint one-third of new academy members. Another one-third will be appointed by the government-controlled Council of Higher Education. As Martin Enserink reports for Science, the academy's president Yücel Kanpolat is campaigning against the decree. He wrote an open letter to the International Human Rights Network of Academies and Scholarly Societies, which sent a letter to Turkey's prime minister Recep Erdoğan in response. The letter's second paragraph reads as follows:

Because one of the charges of our Network is to support sister academies whose independence is threatened, we write, with all due respect, to tell you we are deeply distressed to learn of the recent government decree that appears to restructure TÜBA and effectively remove its independence. (Because we are certain that other science organizations will share our qualms, we are posting this letter on our website.) In writing, it is our sincere hope that you will understand our concern and use your.good offices to quickly reverse this legislation and support and strengthen TÜBA. A healthy and independent science academy can do much to help Turkey produce good science and profit from its benefits.

New York Times: Iran may allow its nuclear activities to be supervised by international inspectors for the next five years—on the condition that the economic sanctions against the country be lifted. Fereydoon Abbasi, the head of Iran’s atomic energy agency, made the offer Monday, but his proposal was “vaguely worded” and “far from clear,” writes David Sanger for the New York Times. Nevertheless, it is the first time since October 2009 that Iran has indicated a willingness to negotiate, and the Obama administration sees it as a sign that the sanctions have been effective.

Scidev.Net: A new award, worth $100 000, will be given to African innovators and inventors who design products that could further the continent's economic transformation, writes Aregu Balleh for SciDev.Net. The Innovation Prize for Africa—a joint initiative of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and the African Innovation Foundation—will be awarded for the first time in February 2012 to the best innovators in three areas: information and communication technology, green technologies, and health and food security. "The main objective of the initiative is to recognize ordinary Africans who have ideas that can be commercialized—ideas that can make a difference in the lives of people," said Aida Opoku-Mensah of UNECA.

What the rest of the world knows about the bomb was learned from seismic waves. Tremors registering at 4.52 on the Richter scale suggested that the yield was on the order of a few kilotons.

Three researchers from Ohio State University detect a different unexpected signature however: an atmosphere shockwave spread out from the test site across the planet and high into the ionosphere. Writing in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists they state that GPS radio waves suffer interference from atmospheric disturbances and by chance the North Korean test occur while they were testing equipment to reduce interference.

By timing when the shockwave from the test hit different GPS stations the three researchers were able to calculate the location of the initial explosion, which matched the seismic data. They suggest that the addition of GPS data to the monitoring stations spread about the world to watch for clandestine nuclear explosions, will strengthen the case for the US to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

NSF: The National Science Foundation has cleared Pennsylvania State University climatologist Michael Mann of any misconduct in the 2009 "Climategate" controversy. Climategate refers to the thousands of emails that were stolen and made public by a hacker who broke into servers owned by the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. The emails, in which climate scientists discussed their work, have been used by global-warming skeptics to dispute that carbon dioxide emissions from industry are impacting Earth’s climate.

This is the fifth investigation into the science behind the emails, and in every case, the scientists involved have been exonerated.

Mann was accused of falsifying research data, concealing and/or deleting information, misusing information, and deviating from accepted practices for conducting research and other scholarly activities.

The report by NSF's Office of the Inspector General states that "no direct evidence has been presented that indicates the Subject fabricated the raw data he used for his research or falsified his results."

"Lacking any direct evidence of research misconduct," the review concludes, "as defined under the NSF Research Misconduct Regulation, we are closing this investigation with no further action."

Science: Six months after the initial request by a politician and a conservative environmental policy research group, the University of Virginia has turned over documents related to scientist Michael Mann’s climate change research. The documents had been requested in January, under Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act, by Robert Marshall, a Republican member of the Virginia House of Delegates, and the American Tradition Institute (ATI). Alleging that the university was deliberately delaying the process, they later filed suit in May. Mann, a physicist and climatologist now at the Pennsylvania State University, was an assistant professor at the University of Virginia from 1999 to 2005. Mann’s paleoclimatological studies have been criticized by global-warming skeptics who deny that Earth's climate is changing because of human activity. The documents released so far represent only about a third of what was requested, according to Paul Chesser, ATI’s executive director.

SciDev: The Chinese government has begun instituting a 10-year plan to develop the potential of the country’s women. The Outline for the Development of Chinese Women (2011-2020) aims to increase to 35% the proportion of women in science and technology. The plan will focus primarily on China’s national laboratories, which will run research projects to train women in professional skills. According to Li Zhenzhen, a researcher at the Institute of Policy and Management at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, although women students have almost the same opportunities as men to study for a PhD in science, they find it difficult to find jobs as researchers because of discrimination. "Women have more family duties than men, which affects women in all fields of work," she said.

New York Times: China's near total monopoly on the rare-earth market, is forcing foreign manufacturers of high-tech materials to move their production to China. Those that don't must contend with uncertain supplies and higher prices. The restrictions are an attempt by the Chinese government to increase the number of high-tech companies in the country and to encourage technology transfer to local Chinese-owned corporations. "We saw the writing on the wall--we simply bought the equipment and ramped up in China to begin with," said Mike Pugh, director of worldwide operations for Intermatrix, who told the New York Times the company would have preferred to build its new factory near its California headquarters.

The move seems to be directed by Premier Wen Jiabao, a former geologist who studied rare earth minerals at graduate school. Denying international access to materials to favor local production may make China in breach of regulations established by the World Trade Organization, of which it is a member. The European Union is considering taking China to court once a related case is finally resolved.

New York Times: General Electric has been working with lasers to develop a cheaper and easier method of producing enriched uranium for use in nuclear reactors, writes William Broad for the New York Times. It has long been thought that the extraordinary purity of laser light could be used to selectively excite uranium-235 and thus ease the identification and extraction of the precious isotope. However, until now, the approach has proved too expensive and difficult. After two years of testing, GE is seeking federal permission to build a $1 billion plant that could make reactor fuel by the ton. Critics fear, however, that rogue states and terrorists could use the technology to make bomb fuel. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is weighing that issue and has promised to give GE a decision by next year.

Chronicle of Higher Education: Across Tokyo, universities are trying to cut their electricity use by 15%. Tokyo's power comes from Tepco, operator of the Fukushima Daiichi and Daini nuclear plants, which have been inoperable since the 11 March earthquake and tsunami. Many other reactors are also offline in the wake of the disaster, and now that it's summer and a peak demand time, Tokyo faces a severe power crunch. The University of Tokyo is one of the 10 largest consumers of electricity in the city and is thus under pressure to take the lead in power conservation. Experiments that require supercomputer simulations, electromagnetic pulsars, and other power-intensive equipment now run during off-peak hours, on evenings and weekends. Classroom temperatures stay at 28 °C (about 82 °F), and professors who use too much electricity receive warnings via Twitter alert. Some other institutions have simply ended classes early to avoid the worst of the summer heat. The Tokyo Institute of Technology has reduced lighting in classrooms by 50%, and banned or curtailed the use of air conditioners, projectors, and other electrical equipment. Although some scholars fear their work will suffer, deep cuts in power use may be the best option to prevent blackouts—which could mean more severe consequences for their work than the current restrictions.

Los Angeles Times: Although switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources is a laudable goal, building and maintaining solar and wind power projects can be hazardous, writes Tiffany Hsu for the Los Angeles Times. Workers perform tasks similar to those in the most dangerous professions: roofing, electrical work, and carpentry. And the industry’s rapid growth means more new and inexperienced people who often must work in small spaces, at great heights, with extremely heavy machinery, and surrounded by high-voltage electrical equipment. Even the public can be at risk, as fires atop wind towers have scattered burning debris, and hastily built installations have collapsed within months. In the wake of complaints from various watchdog groups, however, clean-energy companies are working to implement more uniform safety standards and more intensive training for workers.

New York Times: Even as the House, Senate, and White House wrangle over raising the US debt ceiling, Congressional appropriators are at work writing bills that fix spending for the next fiscal year, which begins on 1 October. As the New York Times's Leslie Kaufman reports, the House version of the bill that funds the Department of Interior, the Forest Service, and the Environmental Protection Agency is proving contentious. The bill emerged from the Republican-led appropriations committee with 39 non-spending provisions, or riders, all of which loosen or curtail regulations aimed at protecting the environment and its natural inhabitants. Satisfying those regulations, the Republicans argue, hinders growth by imposing costs on companies.

New York Times: Yesterday the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission unanimously passed a new rule concerning the planning and financing of new power lines to help the nation’s electricity grid meet the demands of renewable energy and a competitive electricity market, writes Matthew Wald for the New York Times. The new rule is intended to encourage cooperation among the various organizations that manage the nation’s electrical grid in order to build power lines across multiple states and electrical jurisdictions. Such cross-jurisdictional transmission lines are becoming increasingly important as states seek to integrate large amounts of wind and solar power, generally available in remote areas, and transport the power to more populated areas. The rule addresses planning and cost allocation, two of the main impediments to new power line construction. Among its general guidelines is the idea that the costs should be covered by those who benefit, although critics charge that assessing who benefits from a new line is difficult.

Washington Post: Since the 11 March beginning of Japan’s nuclear crisis, Japanese publishers have been releasing books about nuclear power at the rate of more than one a day, writes Chico Harlan for the Washington Post. The author list includes academics, journalists, industry experts, former insiders, and renegade government officials. And not surprising in light of the problems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the views expressed in the books are four to one against nuclear power—roughly the same ratio shown in recent opinion polls. “People are beginning to realize that nuclear power is dangerous. I think maybe now is the time when we can make a decision to make a significant turnaround in our society,” said Hiroaki Koide, a Japanese nuclear researcher at the Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute. After decades of publishing policy that mirrored the pro-nuclear message of Japanese bureaucrats, the tide has turned, and Koide and others who oppose nuclear power are finding that demand for their expertise has swelled over the past months.

Independent: Climate researchers are seeking help from Australian and US naval forces—to fight pirates. The Argo project, which involves 30 nations, uses some 3000 robotic instruments to provide data on the heat and saltiness of the world’s oceans. Its researchers, however, have not been able to deploy 20 of the instruments in an area of the west Indian Ocean, north of Mauritius, because it’s one of the world’s most dangerous areas for piracy; in the first half of this year, 163 of 266 attacks reported globally were carried out by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean—an increase of 100 over the same period last year. The area is of special interest to climatologists because it has had a major influence on Australian and south Asian weather and climate.

Science: As US lawmakers argued over long-term deficit reduction, the Republican-controlled House managed to pass a few energy measures on Friday. An amendment to bring proposed 2012 funding for the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy up to the current-year level of $180 million passed by a vote of 214–213. In addition, the House approved an amendment to add $10 million to the solar energy research program, increasing the appropriations committee draft amount from $163 million to $173 million. Although the funding is significantly lower than what the Obama administration had requested, it did show that “there is a small majority in the House that continues to support these programs,” said Nathan Facey, deputy chief of staff to Representative Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), who sponsored the solar energy amendment. With the vote, the House has now passed 5 of the 12 federal spending bills for the upcoming fiscal year.

Nature: For the past six months, Omid Kokabee, an Iranian graduate student who is affiliated with the physics department of the University of Texas at Austin, has been held in an Iranian jail on suspicion of conspiring against Iran. Now, as Nature's Michele Catanzaro reports, Kokabee will face trial—possibly tomorrow—on charges of "communicating with a hostile government" and "illegal earnings." Kokabee's field of study is laser physics, not the more strategically sensitive nuclear physics or astronautical engineering. Nor, according to Kokabee's friends and colleagues, is he a political activist. The New York–based Committee of Concerned Scientists has written to Iran's supreme leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Hoseyni Khamene’i, urging Kokabee's release and pointing out that

imprisonment of Omid Kokabee and his upcoming trial have planted fear in the hearts of Iranian students that are currently studying abroad. Instead of bringing their skills and knowledge back to Iran, many of them are re-thinking their future in fear of reprisal on their return home.

New York Times: The Brookings Institution has compiled what it describes as one of the most comprehensive and up-to-date analyses of the US’s enigmatic green economy. For its report “Sizing the Clean Economy,” the institution collected data from every county and major metropolitan area in the US from 2003 to 2010. One point the report makes, writes Joanna Foster for the New York Times, is that although green initiatives are driving growth and innovation, market and policy challenges—such as financing shortfalls, inadequate support for innovation, and policy gaps that undercut market demand—are preventing those initiatives from reaching their full potential.

New York Times: The Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns following the 11 March earthquake and tsunami in Japan show that the time has come for "redefining the level of protection that is regarded as adequate" at American nuclear plants, a special task force of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has concluded. The task force reported that American plants need to plan for simultaneous accidents at adjacent reactors, ensure that the "hardened vents" added to reactors over the years to prevent hydrogen explosions would actually work in an emergency, inspect on a regular basis any improvements that have been made, and find a better way to add water to spent-fuel pools. The five-member commission is scheduled to meet next week to consider the task force's recommendations.

BBC: Senior officials at Japan's Kyushu Electric Company asked dozens of employees to send supportive messages to a televised debate about the reopening of one of its nuclear plants—without informing anyone that they were Kyushu employees. Last week, a whistleblower revealed that about 50 workers had sent emails to a televised debate backing a plan to restart Kyushu's Genkai plant, but an internal inquiry has found that more than 100 employees may have been involved. Two-thirds of Japan's nuclear reactors have been closed for inspection since the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. The plant at Genkai, which is in the south, was one of the first plants scheduled to be reopened; the Japanese government announced last week that all plants would have to undergo more rigorous tests before being allowed to resume operation. The broadcasting company that televised the debate has reported that more than 30% of all messages sent in support of the Genkai plant being reopened were from Kyushu employees.

New Scientist: Yesterday, in a draft 2012 budget for NASA and other government agencies, a congressional committee proposed canceling the James Webb Space Telescope. The Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Subcommittee, which creates a draft budget for NASA each year, announced in a press release that it proposed to terminate funding because the telescope "is billions of dollars over budget and plagued by poor management." To go into effect, the draft budget will need to be approved by the entire Appropriations Committee, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and President Obama.

New York Times: As the American nuclear industry faces new scrutiny following the incident at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant, options for safely storing spent nuclear fuel are being reexamined, writes Matthew Wald for the New York Times. Currently, spent fuel is first stored in onsite pools to cool it. It’s then transferred to dry casks when the pools reach capacity. The nuclear calamity in Japan has refocused attention on the vulnerability of America’s spent fuel pools, which are generally more packed than the damaged ones at Fukushima. Some scientists and several members of Congress are calling for the fuel to be moved from the pools into dry casks more quickly; the casks are thought to be safer in the event of an earthquake or plane crash, they have no moving parts, and they require no electricity. However, some industry experts point out that transferring the fuel involves risks of its own and that the US still lacks a dedicated repository for nuclear waste.

Washington Post: Massive coal burning in China may have slowed global warming over the past 10 years, according to a study by Robert Kaufmann of Boston University and colleagues, which was published yesterday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Burning coal releases carbon dioxide, which traps heat from the Sun and raises temperatures. But it also emits particles of sulfur that deflect the Sun's rays, which can have a cooling effect. Unfortunately, the cooling is only temporary, whereas the carbon dioxide from coal burning stays in Earth's atmosphere for a long time. As China works to reduce its pollution, and hence the amount of sulfur it emits, temperatures could begin to climb again. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA have listed 2010 as tied for the warmest year on record, and the Hadley Center of the British Meteorological Office lists it as second warmest, after 1998.

PC Magazine: Earlier this month Nevada passed a bill that will require its Department of Motor Vehicles to draw up rules for autonomous vehicles, which the state defines as motor vehicles that use artificial intelligence, sensors, and GPS coordinates to drive themselves without the active intervention of a human operator. Google, which has been test-driving the cars since 2010, lobbied for the legislation, claiming that the autonomous technology would be safer than human drivers, offer more fuel-efficient cars, and promote economic development. The new law does not mean that the cars will be instantly “street legal.” Rather, it charges the DMV to adopt regulations authorizing the operation of autonomous vehicles, requirements for such vehicles to be operated on a state highway, and insurance standards for testing and operating the cars.

New Scientist: In a case before a US federal court, animal rights groups are arguing that wild horses of the American West should be considered a native species and thus deserving of the same protections as elk or antelope. If the claim is successful, it could change the way the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) manages tens of thousands of wild horses on federal lands, writes Bob Holmes for New Scientist. Although it is generally accepted that North America is the ancestral home of horses, today's wild horses are the feral descendants of domestic ones brought over from Europe centuries ago. Yet according to some researchers, whether or not the horses are native ought to be irrelevant to their treatment by the BLM. Mark Davis at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, is lead author of a new paper in Nature that questions the valuing of native species over nonnative ones. He says the distinction between native and introduced is arbitrary: "The question should be, are wild horses causing a problem? Are they providing benefits? Then you can develop policy to either reduce or increase their numbers."

Science: In four referendums held 12–13 June, Italians voted overwhelmingly to overturn key policies—including the reintroduction of nuclear power—of Italy’s controversial prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. Despite Berlusconi’s various political maneuvers to try to stop the referendums, Italy’s Supreme Court of Cassation ruled that they should go forward. The vote was significant because an estimated 57% of eligible voters showed up, surpassing the 50% needed for a quorum, and some 95% of them voted against Berlusconi’s policies. Italy now becomes the second Western country after Germany to reject nuclear energy following Japan's Fukushima disaster.

Washington Post: Federal agencies announced Thursday that they will seek to clarify the role nanomaterials can have in consumer items such as cosmetics and food production, writes Darryl Fears for the Washington Post. The Environmental Protection Agency will investigate whether nanomaterials in pesticides can have adverse effects on human health and the environment; the agency will publish its policy proposal, a draft of which is available here, in the Federal Register and make it available for public comment during the week of June 13 at www.regulations.gov in docket number EPA-HQ-OPP-2010-0197. The Food and Drug Administration released draft guidelines to regulated industries about whether regulated products involve nanotechnology; they have made the document available online for public comment.

New York Times: A recent report by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that while the clean technology sector has been booming in Europe, Asia, and Latin America—because of direct government investment, tax breaks, loans, and laws and regulations that cap or tax emissions—its competitive position was “at risk” in the US because of “uncertainties surrounding key policies and incentives,” writes Elisabeth Rosenthal for the New York Times. The US Congress’s disagreement over whether climate change is real has allowed companies overseas to profit by exporting their goods and expertise to the US. “This is a $5 trillion business and if we fail to be serious players in the new energy economy, the costs will be staggering to this country,” said Hal Harvey, a Stanford engineer who was an adviser to both the Clinton and the first Bush administration and is now chief executive of the San Francisco–based energy and environment nonprofit organization Climate Works.

Los Angeles Times: Yesterday Bruce Babbitt, former secretary of the Department of the Interior, charged that President Obama has failed to answer “forcefully and persuasively” Republican attacks on environmental safeguards, writes Neela Banerjee for the Los Angeles Times. According to an Interior Department spokesperson, Obama instituted a conservation plan more ambitious than those of his recent predecessors. Since the midterm elections, however, the Obama administration has delayed or weakened several regulations opposed by congressional Republicans and business lobbyists. Babbitt urged the president to reject all future environmental riders and to restore land and waterways by using executive authority to create more parks and wilderness areas.

Nature: On Monday Ollanta Humala became Peru’s president-elect after a very tight race. Unlike opponent Keiko Fujimori, Humala included an extensive science and technology plan in his platform: He called for more technical institutions, support for foreign collaboration, scholarships in the sciences, the creation of a well-paid professional science and technology career path, and the creation of a ministry of science, technology, and innovation, writes Elie Gardner for Nature. In addition, in Humala's victory speech Sunday night he said he hopes to lure Peruvians from all professions back home with additional investment and the creation of jobs. "Science and technology in Peru may have an excellent opportunity to increase its investment of 0.15% of its GDP in this presidential term to 1%," said Jorge Del Carpio of the National Council for Science, Technology, and Technological Innovation.

SciDev.Net: The 'Africa Innovation Outlook 2010', prepared by the African Science and Technology Indicators Initiative (ASTII) covers 19 countries from across the continent and aims to plug an information gap on the state of science in Africa.

The report says that Africa's share of global science continues to decrease, and increasing African competitiveness "will require greater investment in human capital development, the strengthening of scientific institutions and equipment, as well as significantly higher funding for science."

The Independent: A small island off the coast of England with a population of 83 000 residents is slowly becoming a leader in attracting high-tech companies in the space industry.

Best known for its offshore banks and treacherous motorcycle race, the Isle of Man was recently ranked the fifth most likely "nation"—after the US, Russia, China, and India—to lead a manned mission back to the Moon. A recent report by the Economic Policy Centre underlined that by urging the UK government to learn lessons from its tiny dependent's "conspicuously successful" approach.

The island has attracted these companies by offering a corporate tax—with the exception of banking, land, and property earnings—of zero. Income tax is just 20% and total tax bills are capped at £115 000 ($188 000) a year.

Chronicle of Higher Education: Under President Raúl Castro, the Cuban government is undertaking a series of reforms that are transforming Cuba's economy, society, and political landscape. Although the country remains a one-party state, the reforms have proved sufficiently encouraging that the US has eased travel restrictions. In response, academic ties are forming—or reforming—between the US and Cuba, writes Ian Wilhelm of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Harsh travel regulations that President George W. Bush imposed in 2004 had sharply reduced the number of US professors and students visiting Cuba. Now the numbers are rising steadily.

Science: In a Q&A with Richard Stone of Science, the European Union's commissioner for research, innovation, and science, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, recounts last week's official visit to China, her first. Some of the issues covered in the interview—such as intellectual property, nuclear power, and visas for Chinese researchers—pertain to US–China relations as well as to EU–China relations. Other issues, such as the challenge of reaching consensus in a 27-member federation, had a specifically EU flavor:

STONE: When China sets a goal, because of its top-down system of government, it can actually get things done. Are you jealous of China's ability to design and implement a science policy?

GEOGHEGAN-QUINN: I don't think we should be jealous of anyone. We have a standard of living that is widely envied. A collection of 27 individual member states brings a richness and diversity of culture. It's a testament to political innovation.

Science: Starting on 1 June, the next director of Los Alamos National Laboratory will be Charles McMillan, a former nuclear weapons designer who has more than 28 years of scientific and leadership experience in weapons science, stockpile certification, experimental physics, and computational science. McMillan, who has a PhD in physics from MIT, has spent most of his career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he managed nuclear weapons research. He joined Los Alamos in 2006 and was principal associate director for weapons programs when he was picked for the laboratory's top job. McMillan replaces the current director, Michael Anastasio, who announced in January his intention to retire.

New York Times: Yesterday Governor Chris Christie announced that New Jersey would become the first state to withdraw from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a 10-state trading system, reports Mireya Navarro for the New York Times. Under RGGI, 10 Northeastern and mid-Atlantic states ranging from Maine to Maryland set a ceiling on carbon dioxide emissions and require power plants to purchase credits that allow them to emit specified amounts of carbon dioxide. According to Christie, the initiative “does nothing more than tax electricity, tax our citizens, tax our businesses, with no discernible or measurable impact upon our environment.” Environmental advocates called the decision a serious blow to the state’s efforts to reduce emissions from power plants and foster a shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Nevertheless, Christie says that New Jersey would continue to work to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by increasing the proportion of electricity generated by natural gas, the Sun, and the wind.

Guardian: The president of the Royal Society, Nobel laureate Paul Nurse, believes that freedom of information laws need to provide for both transparency and protection from harassment, writes Alok Jha for the Guardian. Climate scientists have been targeted by aggressive and organized campaigns of requests for data and other research materials, including unpublished drafts of papers later published in journals—with annotations explaining every change in each successive version of the paper. Complying with one such request is cumbersome. Complying with many of them can prevent much else from getting done, and that appears to have been the intent in some cases. The situation is made more difficult by the relative anonymity of the people filing requests; usually, not much is known about their sources of funding or the context from which they are making the request.

New Scientist: Countries such as China, India, and Saudi Arabia have begun to lease well-watered land in Africa to grow food crops. Doing so is cheaper and easier than maintaining and improving the water resources back home, writes Anil Ananthaswamy for New Scientist. To study this global virtual water trade network, researchers Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe of Princeton University and Samir Suweis of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne have built a mathematical model—the first of its kind. According to their findings, published in Geophysical Research Letters, a small number of countries have a large number of connections to other countries to access their water resources, whereas a much larger number of countries have very few connections, rendering them more vulnerable to market forces. Thus, the richer countries tend to monopolize the world’s water supply. In another study published in Geophysical Research Letters, Paolo D'Odorico of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville and coworkers found that while, in the short term, a rise in the virtual water trade can prevent famine, in the long term such trade reduces societies’ resilience to catastrophes like exceptional droughts and crop failure, which could be on the rise due to climate change.

New York Times: Chicago is preparing for a wetter, steamier future based on climate scientists’ predictions. Inspired by the Kyoto international treaty of 2006, then mayor Richard Daley initiated efforts to reduce carbon emissions and raise Chicago’s profile as an environmentally friendly town. Alleys, bike lanes, and parking spaces are being repaved with water-permeable materials; more vegetation is being planted to provide more shade, absorb carbon dioxide, sponge up excess water, and reduce energy use; plans for air conditioning all public schools are in the works; and thermal radar is being used to map the hottest spots to target for pavement removal and more vegetation. “Cities adapt or they go away,” said Aaron Durnbaugh, deputy commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Environment. “Climate change is happening in both real and dramatic ways.” Chicago is often called the Second City, but it is way out in front of most in terms of adaptation, writes Leslie Kaufman for the New York Times.

New York Times: Yesterday the Toronto District School Board announced a plan to install solar panels on its schools as a way of paying for much-needed repairs to the schools’ roofs. Facing a $3 billion backlog in roofing repairs, the board plans to install the panels on about 450 of its 558 schools and sell electricity to Ontario’s government-owned utility. Ontario, which promotes the development of alternative energy by paying a substantial premium for solar-generated electricity, came up with the idea and gave the school board a grant to develop it.

New York Times: Five years before the emergency vents at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant were disabled by a power failure, engineers at a reactor in Minnesota warned US regulators about the same issue, writes Matthew Wald for the New York Times. Anthony Sarrack told staff members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) that the venting systems at his reactor had serious design flaws: They were dependent on electric power, which could be cut in an emergency, and on human workers, who could become incapacitated. More automatic, passive systems are needed. Sarrack's proposal was rejected by operations department officials at his company because they wanted direct control over the reactor. The NRC considered Sarrack's warning but decided against making changes at the time, although they are now studying the events at Fukushima Daiichi with an eye toward reducing overall risk, including making vents more passive without sacrificing manually controlled systems.

Telegraph: The UK has committed to an ambitious plan to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2025. To meet the target, the country will have to move to nuclear and wind power, adopt strict energy efficiency measures to make businesses and homes less wasteful, and increase the number of electric cars. Critics warn that such measures could damage the competitiveness of British industry and limit economic growth. Energy secretary Chris Huhne, however, has “promised a support package for industry to help them move to renewable or low energy power,” writes Louise Gray for the Telegraph.

Science: The safety of the full-body x-ray scanners used at airports is being questioned by several scientists. Five professors at the University of California, San Francisco, and one at Arizona State University have written a letter to White House science adviser John Holdren in which they question why the Transportation Security Administration won’t allow independent testing of the scanners by outside scientists. Although the TSA says the scanners have already been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration, NIST, and the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, the letter writers point out flaws in the testing. In addition, studies published in scientific journals in the last few months have also “cast doubt on the radiation dose and the machines' ability to find explosives,” according to Michael Grabell of ProPublica.

Nature: The hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica is starting to heal, say researchers in Australia, who have published their findings in Geophysical Research Letters. Thanks to the Montreal Protocol of 1989, which banned the use of chlorofluorocarbons and other ozone-destroying chemicals, levels of anthropogenic ozone depleters detected in the region's stratosphere have been falling since around the turn of the millennium, writes James Mitchell Crow for Nature. Before Murry Salby, an environmental scientist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and his colleagues could investigate manmade ozone depletion, however, they first had to account for the naturally occurring annual fluctuation in ozone levels. The researchers found that average springtime levels are linked to changes in a particular pattern of stratospheric weather known as dynamical forcing. Once they figured that out, they were able to detect the gradual recovery of the ozone levels, which had declined precipitously until the late 1990s before beginning a slow rebound. A complicating factor in predicting future ozone levels will be the influence of climate change, said David Karoly, a climate scientist at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Guardian: Savage cuts to budgets for hardware and facilities will transform scientific research in the UK, writes Ian Sample for the Guardian. Top-end equipment will be concentrated in elite universities and government centers, leaving researchers elsewhere to strike deals to get access to the facilities. Starting this month, scientists can apply to research councils for half the cost of lab equipment valued between £10 000 ($16 820) and £121 588 ($197 960) and must find the rest of the money from other sources. Research councils can choose to cover the full cost of more expensive equipment, but will decide where any facilities are based. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, whose budget will fall from £49 million ($80 million) in 2010–11 to £25 million ($41 million) in 2013–14, said it would reform equipment sharing and might pull out of some facilities to better fund leading centers. The Institute of Physics said that the lack of capital funds was likely to affect the UK's ability to take a leading role in the European Extremely Large Telescope, an observatory to be based in Chile.

New York Times: The Arctic Council, meeting today in Greenland, is expected to sign its first treaty on maritime search and rescue for the Arctic region. The council—which is composed of representatives from Canada, Russia, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, the US, Sweden, and Finland—was formed in 1996 to promote cooperation and coordination among the Arctic states on such issues as environmental protection and sustainable development. According to Steven Myers of the New York Times, “Officials said they hoped [the treaty] would become a model for increasing international cooperation in the Arctic on far more difficult issues as the pursuit of natural resources sharpens unresolved territorial disputes and raises the prospect of pollution and environmental catastrophes.” Among the attendees is US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is the first US secretary of state to attend one of the council’s biannual meetings.

Nature: Earlier this week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report examining the current status and future prospects for renewable forms of energy, such as specialized energy crops, sunlight, wind, and tides. The panel, which was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme, expects that renewable energy will inevitably supplant fossil fuels. How quickly the shift takes place will depend not only on technological advances but also on government action, the report says. Progress is already being made. Despite the global financial crisis, renewable energy capacity grew in 2009: wind by more than 30%, hydropower by 3%, grid-connected photovoltaics by more than 50%, geothermal by 4%, and solar thermal by more than 20%. Annual biodiesel production had increased to 0.6 exajoules (17 billion liters) by the end of 2009.

New York Times: Carbon dioxide makes up only 0.04% of Earth's atmosphere. According to a panel convened by the American Physical Society, the low concentration is the main reason technologies for capturing atmospheric carbon dioxide are unlikely to succeed as a means of forestalling climate change. At an estimated $600 per ton, the cost of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is too high to be practical. Although removing a ton of carbon dioxide from the exhaust chimneys of coal-fired power plants is less expensive, wide-scale implementation of carbon capture at power plants would still require government action to offset the cost.

San Francisco Chronicle: Last year, San Francisco's Board of Supervisors voted 10–1 to require the manufacturers of cell phones to disclose the level of radiation emitted by their phones. The levels would have appeared next to phones on display in retail outlets. To fight the bill, which never became law, the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association sued the city, arguing that the Federal Communications Commission has certified that all phones marketed in the US are safe. Faced with the prospect of both losing the suit and paying the association's legal fees, the city has put the bill on indefinite hold. As the Chronicle's Heather Knight reports, the city will likely enact a weaker version of the original bill.

BBC: The European Space Agency is planning a replacement for its Automated Transfer Vehicles (ATVs), and it would like NASA to be involved. Since 2008, the unmanned ATVs have been taking supplies to, and trash from, the International Space Station. The ATVs are expendable. After leaving the ISS, they follow a course that results in their burning up in Earth's atmosphere. Now that only three more ATVs remain in production, ESA has entered discussions with NASA to jointly develop a spaceship based on the ATV.

New York Times: Environmentalists sued the US government yesterday, claiming "that key agencies had failed in their duty to protect the earth's atmosphere as a public trust to be guarded for future generations," writes Felicity Barringer for the New York Times. The plaintiffs—who belong to Our Children’s Trust, a coalition of groups concerned about climate change—will be filing similar lawsuits against states around the country. Two novel aspects of the suit are that most of the individual plaintiffs are teenagers and that the suit relies on the public trust doctrine, which dates to Roman times. Legal experts said they were unsure whether the new lawsuit could gain legal traction, given that it presents issues that overlap in some ways with a public nuisance case already brought by several states against the five largest US utilities.

Nature: China plans to deploy its own space station by 2020 as a key part of its human spaceflight program. The proposed three-person station, which will be smaller in mass than either the International Space Station or Russia's Mir, will consist of an 18.1-meter-long core module, two 14.4-meter experimental modules, a manned spaceship, and a cargo craft. Official state media confirmed that the Tiangong 1 and Shenzhou 8 unmanned space modules will attempt docking in orbit later this year; that maneuver is essential for assembling a station in orbit. If the docking is successful, China will proceed with construction by launching additional modules over the next decade.

Guardian: Connie Hedegaard, the European Union's Commissioner for Climate Action, is seeking to extend the EU's renewable energy targets beyond 2020. The renewable energy industry is currently facing intense pressure from lobbyists from the gas industry, who have held a series of high-level meetings with senior members of the European parliament to promote gas as a cheaper green alternative to renewables. To support their claim, the lobbyists have circulated a report by the European Gas Advocacy Forum (EGAF) that appears to show that Europe could meet its 2050 greenhouse gas targets and save €900 billion by using gas instead of renewable energy sources. However, the report was adapted from a previous study that contradicts the claim, and the original study's coauthors, the European Climate Foundation, have disowned the EGAF report.

AFP: Anatoly Perminov will be replaced as head of the Russian space agency Roskosmos after a series of high-profile mishaps. Vladimir Popovkin, currently first deputy defense minister, will replace him. Although Perminov had reached the maximum age for state employees, there have been clear indications of government frustration with Roskosmos's performance for some time. The latest manned launch for the International Space Station was delayed in March, less than a month before the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's first spaceflight. In February, the Geo-IK-2 military satellite was rendered useless for defense when it was put into the wrong orbit. And in December, a fuel miscalculation caused three navigation satellites for the new Russian GLONASS system to crash into the ocean off Hawaii instead of reaching orbit. In February, Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov issued a scathing assessment of Roskosmos's performance, saying that the GLONASS mishap was characteristic of its problems and that any repeat satellite failure would be unacceptable. Perminov has served as Roskosmos chief since March 2004.

Science: A clause in the US spending bill signed into law last week prohibits US-China collaborations that involve NASA or the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The author of the clause, Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA), is a fierce opponent of the Chinese government; he has long criticized China's policies toward Tibet and its suppression of religious and minority leaders and political dissidents. Wolf says the US doesn’t want to give China “the opportunity to take advantage of our technology, and we have nothing to gain” from dealings with that nation. White House officials say that they are still reviewing the bill's language, writes Jeffrey Mervis for Science.

Science News: Recent cuts to NASA's budget mean that the European Space Agency (ESA) will have to scrap or scale down proposed space missions to study supermassive black holes and other high-energy phenomena. One of those missions, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), would have been the first dedicated space mission to search for gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity—generated by sources such as merging supermassive black holes. LISA was estimated to cost $2.4 billion; NASA's share would have been $1.5 billion. The other mission, the International X-ray Observatory, was originally going to use a large x-ray mirror to examine some of the universe's earliest supermassive black holes. The cost of that project was approximately $5 billion, with NASA's share being $3.1 billion. ESA is considering going forward with a revamped gravitational-wave mission, and smaller scale versions of other missions.

Los Angeles Times: A cap-and-trade carbon emissions plan in California, modeled on Europe's six-year-old system, may be delayed by litigation. Scheduled to begin in January 2012, the program has been challenged by local environmental groups that contend the California Air Resources Board failed to analyze alternatives to trading. "We have to be open to the possibility that there could be other approaches and that we could achieve [carbon] reductions in a different way," said board chairwoman Mary Nichols. Because the European cap-and-trade system has been plagued by tax fraud schemes and cybertheft, it was hoped that the California plan would set a better example for the US. The court's decision is expected to be appealed, but any delay in the January start date could throw a wrench into the financial planning of hundreds of companies, writes Margot Roosevelt for the Los Angeles Times.

Nature: Laurent Stricker, chairman of the World Association of Nuclear Operators (WANO), says that the nuclear industry has been overconfident and that it needs to rethink power plant safety in light of the disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. While WANO has incorporated into reactor operations the lessons learned from prior disasters, it has not yet done so with reactor design issues. Evaluation of the safety of any reactor design needs to take into account the environmental context, including population proximity, in which that reactor will operate. In addition, current safety reviews are often based on assuming one reactor accident at a site, rather than evaluating the risk of several reactor accidents occurring at once at the same site. Stricker has also proposed that if nuclear plant operators fail to make progress on safety issues that have been flagged as "areas for improvement," WANO would be released from its obligations of confidentiality.

Science: Language banning US government contributions to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been dropped from the compromise spending bill of 2011. The language had been included as a "policy rider" in the House of Representatives draft of the spending bill; the rider was first authored by Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO) as a standalone bill. Paul Sloca, a spokesperson for Luetkemeyer, says that the congressman intends to reintroduce the bill and may broaden it to bar the federal government from supporting any meetings aimed at negotiating a global treaty on climate change. A February press release from the congressman states that the IPCC "is an entity that is fraught with waste and fraud, and engaged in dubious science" and that his legislation would stop the government from spending "$13 million" on the IPCC. The US contribution to the IPCC last year was about $3 million, according to the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Washington Post: TEPCO, operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, announced that it would pay initial compensation in the amount of ¥1 million (about $12 000) to each family and ¥750 000 (about $9000) to each single adult evacuated from the zone around the plant; the company expects to pay ¥50 billion in the initial round of compensation. Some residents of the area near the plant have expressed doubt that the initial payment will be sufficient to cover the costs they've sustained, and the governor of Fukushima prefecture, Yuhei Sato, has criticized both TEPCO's and the national government's handling of the disaster, demanding faster action and full compensation for the evacuees. Japanese law exempts nuclear plant operators from liability when nuclear accidents are "caused by a grave natural disaster of an exceptional character." While the tsunami was indeed of exceptional character—the last time Japan saw one of that magnitude was probably in 869 AD, in Sendai—it would be politically disastrous for TEPCO to refuse to pay damages on that basis. Whether the company will face lawsuits going forward is unclear; Japan relies heavily on nonjudicial resolution of disputes.

Nature: The most comprehensive overhaul of US patent law is up for review in the House after similar legislation passed the Senate on 8 March. The bill proposes to change the US patent system from a first-to-invent arrangement to a first-to-file arrangement. Currently, if two inventors file similar patent applications at around the same time, they go into an expensive process called "interference," during which a specialized division of the US Patent Office tries to discover who created the invention first. The average cost of the process to inventors is between $400 000 and $500 000. Advocates of the new legislation say that the change will make it easier for scientists to obtain patents without getting bogged down in litigation; opponents are concerned that the change may lead to a sudden increase in filings, which the agency won't be able to handle without a significant increase in staff. One provision of the law that has not been heavily disputed would allow outsiders to challenge new patents in a post-grant review process without having to resort to costly litigation.

Los Angeles Times: According to a new report by the Pew Environment Group, mining claims pose an environmental threat to territory near the borders of 10 iconic US national parks and wilderness areas. The Grand Canyon is especially at risk, where uranium claims have increased 2000% since 2004, because of possible damage to the Colorado River watershed. In the wake of rising global prices, companies have filed claims at an increased rate to mine copper, gold, and other metals as well as uranium. Critics blame an outmoded 1872 law, which allows corporations to stake out rights to federal lands for mining without a competitive bid and to extract resources without paying royalties. "We're still dealing with an antiquated law that in its wake has left huge cleanup and contamination problems all over," said Representative Raul Grijalva (D-AZ).

Guardian: A new study has found that the legal requirement in the UK and Europe to put biofuels in gas and diesel is unethical. An 18-month inquiry by the independent Nuffield Council on Bioethics found that the need to meet rising biofuel targets has led to exploitation of workers, damage to the environment, loss of wildlife, and higher food prices. Food prices have risen because the main biofuels currently used come from food crops such as corn and sugar cane. Also, biofuel targets have driven rapid expansion of biofuels production in parts of the world with lower ethical standards, which has led to the destruction of rainforest and to near-slavery conditions for workers. Several corrective measures have been suggested, including switching from using food crops to agricultural waste, such as straw and fast-growing perennials, and adopting an international certification scheme, like Fairtrade, to guarantee that the production of biofuels is fair, equitable, and sustainable.

Science: Most funding for research in Europe—about 85%—comes from national research councils. A much smaller proportion—about 5%—comes from the European Science Foundation, which supports cross-border research and allocates funding through a competitive, pan-European grant system. Given that imbalance, some science managers in Europe want ESF to merge with an alliance of national research councils, to relinquish its role as a funding agency, and to become a lobbying and advisory group. The merger plan was announced in January, but has met with opposition. Now, as Science's Daniel Clery reports, a group of 37 prominent European scientists has released an open letter protesting against ESF's new role. One of the group's concerns is that in recent years ESF has been effective at supporting young scientists in curiosity-driven, bottom-up research.

BBC: The University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Observatory in the UK will serve as headquarters for the world’s biggest and most sensitive telescope. The Square Kilometer Array will consist of thousands of small radio dishes spread over a distance of more than 3000 km. It is hoped that the €1.5 billion project, which involves partners from 20 countries, will reveal how planets and galaxies are born, give clues about the nature of dark energy, and help to detect signs of alien civilizations. Construction is scheduled to begin by 2016 and to be completed by 2024. The location of the telescope, which must be in the Southern Hemisphere, is yet to be decided, but could be built in Australia or southern Africa.

Science: According to United Nations trade data, Japanese nuclear energy operators import 73% of their fuel from manufacturers in the US. The crisis in Fukushima has led policy experts to ask whether the US should reexamine its legal obligations and add safety rules to the agreements countries sign when they purchase US fuel or reactors. Currently, the US has the power to act only to ensure that spent fuel is not vulnerable to theft or terrorism or used to make nuclear weapons; it does not have the power to act in response to environmental or safety concerns. Ted Jones of the Nuclear Energy Institute says that the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission is already involved in international safety efforts, and that the best way to engage with other nations to increase the safety of spent fuel management is through multilateral organizations such as the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency. "The idea that U.S. regulations that aren't shared by other supplier countries could be an effective influence on fuel risk is probably not a very good idea," said Jones.

New York Times: Despite Japan's nuclear troubles following the devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck just weeks ago, South Africa's government is moving ahead with a new energy plan that includes nuclear power. Currently, South Africa depends heavily on coal, which provides 84% of its electricity. The newly ratified Integrated Resource Plan would wean the nation off coal by building half a dozen new nuclear power plants along South Africa's coastline and taking advantage of renewable energy sources such as the Sun and wind.

Chronicle of Higher Education: As budgets tighten in the US, universities and the government are both pushing for more interdisciplinary science, or “team science.” The concept is not new—the Manhattan Project in the 1940s is a prime example. A major advantage of the approach is that it typically “encompasses the scientific process from basic discoveries through commercial production,” writes Paul Basken for the Chronicle of Higher Education. That is a concept that lawmakers and voters can more easily understand and, therefore, are more willing to finance. However, both universities and government are also calling for more effort from the other to make it work: Government officials say universities need to make fundamental changes in tenure and other faculty rules, while university officials counter that significant change in financial incentives from government are needed.

BBC: China remains the world’s leading investor in low-carbon energy technology, according to a global study by the US Pew Environment Group. In 2010 China invested $54.4 billion. Germany is in second place, having invested $41.2 billion, and the US slipped to third place, with $34 billion invested. Among the various technologies being funded, solar has experienced the strongest growth, according to Michael Liebreich, chief executive of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, which compiled the data for Pew’s report. According to the report, China was the world's leading producer of wind turbines and solar energy units in addition to attracting the most investment.

New Scientist: The Singapore government is considering building a nuclear power reactor underground. The idea was proposed by Hooman Peimani, an energy security specialist at the National University of Singapore. Because the island country is so densely populated, there is no space where a typical large-scale reactor could be safely built and operated. Drawbacks to the plan include that such reactors would have to be scaled down in size because of the extra cost of building underground and that they could not be built in any earthquake-prone areas or regions with high water tables. However, in the event of a severe accident occurring at such an underground reactor, the access tunnels could be cemented in to contain any problems.

Los AngelesTimes: The US government's crucial radiation alert network in California is not fully functional; that leaves the stretch of coast between Los Angeles and San Francisco unprotected in the event of a nuclear emergency, according to Jack Dolan and Ron-Gong Lin II in the Los Angeles Times. Half of the 12 Environmental Protection Agency detectors in California have problems that could delay alerts by several hours. The system is critical for warning the public of a sudden radiation danger from foreign or domestic sources. That weakness has not caused problems during the Japanese nuclear crisis because radiation reaching US shores has been minuscule, but critics say the lack of consistent alerts could pose a public health concern.

Nature: Changes in US government policy should make it easier for government scientists to serve in scientific societies, writes Eugenie Samuel Reich for Nature. A memorandum on scientific integrity issued by the Office of Science and Technology Policy in December explicitly encourages government scientists to get involved with societies; previously, the government tended to view such associations ambivalently or negatively. Yet many government scientists affected by the policy change say that serious legal and ethical pitfalls remain. Strict conflict-of-interest rules in the US can create administrative barriers for government scientists trying to participate in societies that are relevant to their disciplines. Employees who join outside organizations will have to be careful not to run afoul of these rules, notes John Fitzgerald, policy director of the Society for Conservation Biology in Washington DC.

NPR: As fears about an unstoppable disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant have calmed a bit, the crisis has entered a second phase—tainted food and water, writes Richard Knox for NPR. Over the weekend, radioactive iodine and cesium emitted by the crippled facility turned up in milk, spinach and other greens, canola seeds, fava beans, and drinking water. As a precaution, the Japanese government has been handing out protective potassium iodide pills to people and advised some localities that residents should not drink the water although they may bath in it. Food and water contamination is still too low to impact human health, however, says the World Health Organization, in a report by CNN.

Science: South Africa is competing with Australia for the proposed Square Kilometer Array radiotelescope, an array of hundreds of dishes spread over thousands of kilometers. Hence, South African astronomers are looking at converting old telecommunications dishes into radiotelescopes to produce a low-cost array that would span the continent, writes Daniel Clery for Science. Across Africa, the 30-meter satellite dishes that were once the backbone of the continent's communications are being replaced by fiber-optic cables. The astronomers have already developed political links with other African nations and hope to set up a couple of prototypes—perhaps in Ghana and South Africa itself—to encourage other governments to fund conversion of dishes within their boundaries.