Recently in Policy & Government Category

Science: Four of Russia's most prominent physics labs are to be merged into a new national research center. The institutes, which have languished in the post-Soviet era, have cautiously welcomed the raised profile the merger will bring.

But a different reform aimed at separating basic and applied research at one of the institutes—the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, Russia's premier lab for nuclear energy research--has researchers up in arms.

The merger, announced in a presidential decree last month, will combine the Institute for High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Protvino, 100 kilometers south of Moscow; the B. P. Konstantinov Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute (PNPI) in St. Petersburg; and two Moscow labs--the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) and the Kurchatov. The reorganization is aimed at smoothing the path of innovations into industry, says Sergei Kiriyenko, chief of the nuclear energy agency Rosatom and one of the key officials behind the decree.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NPR: As the world prepares for crucial climate-change talks in Copenhagen next month, there is a growing rift between the US and some of the world's poorest nations. The gap grew wider this past week, at the final official pre-Copenhagen talks in Barcelona.

NPR: The US Department of Energy is offering $10 million to the first individual or company to develop an energy-efficient LED replacement for the standard 60-watt incandescent bulb.

DOE lighting program manager James Brodrick discusses the L Prize with NPR, and what makes a better bulb.

Science: When the Max Planck Society planted institutes across the former East Germany, it recruited scientists from around the world for its ambitious project.

But only two out of more than 60 directors in the newly founded institutes were recruited from the East itself. Today, the society has 267 active directors; only five grew up on the eastern side of the divided Germany. And only one started a career before 1989.

Those statistics are a sign of the mixed blessings that reunification brought for East German scientists.

For many, especially the younger ones, it was a great opportunity. But others were set adrift when entire preexisting eastern institutes were closed or cut to a fraction of their original size.

Related Links
Big dreams come true
Aufbau Ost: Max Planck's East German experiment

NYTimes.com: Despite a six-year effort to build trusted computer chips for military systems, the Pentagon now manufactures in secure facilities run by American companies only about 2 % of the more than $3.5 billion of integrated circuits bought annually for use in military gear.

That shortfall is viewed with concern by current and former US military and intelligence agency executives who argue that the menace of so-called Trojan horses hidden in equipment circuitry is among the most severe threats the nation faces in the event of a war in which communications and weaponry rely on computer technology.

Science: Many aerosols cool the atmosphere (a negative forcing), whereas ozone and black carbon aerosol have a warming effect (a positive forcing).

There is thus a strong motivation for treating air pollution control and climate change in common policy frameworks, argue Almut Arneth and colleagues in Science.

However, changes in pollutant and precursor emissions, atmospheric burden, and radiative forcing are not necessarily proportional.

Drew T. Shindell and colleagues at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, report that current models do not capture many of the complex atmospheric processes involving aerosols and reactive trace gases.

As Arneth and colleagues state:

Changing aerosol burdens may alter local and regional cloud cover and precipitation, change the intensity or timing of the monsoon circulation, and even shift precipitation across national borders. Changes in cloud cover and precipitation will also feed back on the photochemistry and rainout of short-lived species. These issues must be considered if aerosol emissions are to become part of climate policy.

Given the toxicity of pollutants, the question is not whether ever stricter air pollution controls will be implemented, but when and where. The jury is out on whether air pollution control will accelerate or mitigate climate change. Still, the studies available to date mostly suggest that air pollution control will accelerate warming in the coming decades.

Related Links
Clean the air, heat the planet?
Improved attribution of climate forcing to emissions

WSJ.com: The H1-B visa program that feeds skilled workers to top-tier US technology companies and universities is on track to leave thousands of spots unfilled for the first time since 2003, a sign of how the weak economy has eroded employment even among highly trained professionals.

Last year, even as the recession began to bite, employers snapped up the 65,000 visas available in just one day. This year, however, as of 25 September—nearly six months after the US government began accepting applications—only 46,700 petitions had been filed.

In addition to the weak economy, companies have curbed applications in the face of rising costs associated with hiring foreign-born workers.

While the number of visa holders is small compared with the US work force, their contribution is huge, employers say. For example, last year 35% of Microsoft's patent applications in the US came from new inventions by visa and green-card holders, according to company general counsel Brad Smith.

USA Today: Ever since the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, which gave federally funded university researchers the right to license their inventions as a way to spur innovation and economic growth, technology transfer offices have sprung up all over, with steady growth.

In 1991, US universities filed 1,335 patents and received $130 million in royalties. In 2005, they filed 9,306 patents and received $1.8 billion in royalties.

At some universities, the policy on who owns inventions created using university resources required researchers, at some future date, to "agree to assign" ownership rights to the university.

But contracts researchers have with industry may be worded slightly differently and state an inventor "will assign and do hereby assign" his or her rights to the funder, which can lead to court cases arising over who owns the innovation rights.

Related news story
Painful lesson on patents Inside Higher Ed

Nature: More money for science is always good. Or is it? Six experts tell Nature what concerns them most about the US stimulus spending and suggest ways to ensure that it benefits research and society in the long term.

guardian.co.uk: The UK government is poised to allow nuclear power generators to use ordinary landfill sites for dumping "hundreds of thousands of tons" of waste in an attempt to reduce the £73 billion ($140 bn) cost of decommissioning old reactors.

The move has triggered a swath of applications around the country from big corporations trying to cash in on this potential new business, but infuriated local governments and environmental campaign groups.

latimes.com: Three federal agencies—the Food and Drug Administration, the Defense Department and the National Eye Institute—announced last week that they are launching a three-year effort to gauge how many, and which, patients suffer troubling symptoms after undergoing the vision correction procedure called Lasik.

Nature News: The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), near Gakona, Alaska, has for twenty years used radio waves to probe Earth's magnetic field and ionosphere.

One of the most visible results of the experiments—since the facility upgraded its transmission power output from 1 to 3.6 megawatts—is that they can create lights in the sky that are similar to auroras.

The technique works by using the high-frequency radio waves to accelerate electrons in the atmosphere, increasing the energy of their collisions and thereby creating a glow.

In February last year, HAARP unexpectedly managed to induce a strange bullseye pattern in the night sky. "This is the really exciting part—we've made a little artificial piece of ionosphere," said US Air Force Research Laboratory physicist Todd Pedersen to Nature's Naomi Lubick.

Physics Today: An article in the London Times that suggesting the UK was considering pulling out of the CERN has caused consternation in the physics community, and denials from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), but a review of the UK's science expenditure is ongoing.

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) has suffered from a financial crisis caused by over-spending on some high-profile projects such as the Diamond synchrotron light source. In response, STFC has cut back some grants and support for some facilities, and is conducting a major science review through its advisory panels, and with input from the science community and STFC's international partners. The report is due in December. The STFC has "to live within constrained budgets if need be, and to diversify our funding base," says STFC's Keith Mason.

A misquoted article

The Times article misquoted the STFC's chief operating officer Richard Wade, says Mason and took other comments out of context.

The UK's agreement with CERN is governed by an international treaty, and could only be changed with UK Government approval and with consultation with the other CERN partners, it cannot be made unilaterally by the STFC alone. It was the strength of this international agreement that during the 1980s, protected the UK's particle physics community's membership of CERN but also allowed the UK to negotiate a reduction in its membership fees.

CERN membership did however, have a knock on effect of leading to cuts in other areas of UK particle physics.

A vision for today

"The STFC's position in relation to the LHC is made clear in our July vision document," says Mason, "which states that 'our highest priority in particle physics is to exploit the Large Hadron Collider at CERN'."

The vision document also says that the UK's highest priorities in ground-based astronomy is to exploit membership of the European Southern Observatory, which gives access to the Very Large Telescope and to the ALMA millimeter astronomy array, and to carry out R&D towards the next generation European Extremely Large Telescope. The UK is also heavily involved in the proposed Square Kilometer Array radio telescope.

A bleak UK budget

However, the public sector, which funds the majority of research in the UK, is expected to suffer significant cuts next year because of the recession. The ongoing science review will "ensure STFC is prudently prepared for the tougher budget environment," says Mason, and "ask tough questions about the future direction of our science and technology program, including the balance between [science] disciplines."

The consultation encompasses all of STFC's programs, and includes an examination of the cost-effectiveness of international subscriptions, including CERN, the European Southern Observatory, the ILL neutron source and others.

"All UK publicly-funded bodies have a responsibility to ensure value-for-money," says Mason, "and STFC has discussed with our international partners the need to restrain costs and, if possible, reduce expenditure."

The next few months will be challenging says Mason, "but an exciting opportunity [for STFC] to set the course for the future."

Paul Guinnessy

NYTimes.com: The world leaders who met at the United Nations to discuss climate change this week are faced with an intricate challenge: building momentum for an international climate treaty at a time when global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years.

The plateau in temperatures has been seized upon by skeptics as evidence that the threat of global warming is overblown. And some climate experts worry that it could hamper treaty negotiations and slow the progress of legislation to curb carbon dioxide emissions in the United States.

Scientists say the pattern of the last decade—after a precipitous rise in average global temperatures in the 1990s—is a result of cyclical variations in ocean conditions and has no bearing on the long-term warming effects of greenhouse gases building up in the atmosphere.

But trying to communicate such scientific nuances to the public—and to policy makers—can be frustrating, they say.

Nature: In 1992, three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a spy walked into the US embassy in Warsaw and offered to sell the CIA the real and code names of all intelligence agents from the HVA (Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung)—the foreign department of the Stasi, the East German Ministry for State Security. The CIA bought the highly sensitive information for a mere US$75,000.

The spoils—released to the Berlin Stasi archive and made available to history professor Kristie Macrakis at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta in 2005—have the potential to alter popular perceptions of the activities of the East German intelligence agency and secret police.

Macrakis's analysis of the CIA material reveals that about 40% of all HVA sources planted in West German companies, research institutions, and universities were stealing scientific and technical secrets.

guardian.co.uk: A 2C rise in global temperatures will not necessarily result in the calamity predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), China's most senior climatologist has told the Guardian.

Despite growing evidence that storms in China are getting fiercer, droughts longer and typhoons more deadly, Xiao Ziniu, the director general of the Beijing Climate Centre, said it was too early to determine the level of risk posed by global warming.

Nature News: India's environment minister Jairam Ramesh will visit the site of a proposed underground neutrino laboratory next month, to try to break the impasse between physicists and environmentalists over its construction.

The US$160 million India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) was to have been completed by 2012 to study the elusive particles known as neutrinos. But its construction is mired in controversy over the wisdom of locating the facility in prime elephant and tiger habitat at Singara in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, 250 kilometers south of Bangalore.

The Guardian: The combined cost of replacing the UK's Trident nuclear missile system and building, equipping, and running two large aircraft carriers will be as much as US$260 billion, far more than the UK government has admitted, says an in-depth study by the political action group Greenpeace.

The discrepancy is because the government's published estimates on Trident do not include the cost of conventional military forces directly assigned to support the nuclear force, nor the cost of new installations that would be required at the atomic weapons establishment at Aldermaston, or exchange rate fluctuations in equipment and supplies such as the F-35 jet fighter bought from the US.

David Cameron, leader of the conservative party, the main opposition group in the UK Parliament, said that a strategic defence review would be carried out rapidly should the conservatives win the general election. He made it clear that no area of the defense budget was exempt from discussions.

The Labour party, which runs the government, indicated that it might consider scaling back the number of Britain's nuclear missile–carrying submarines from four to three.

There is also widespread opposition replacing Trident among army chiefs, reflected yesterday by Lord Guthrie, chief of defence staff under former prime minister Tony Blair. Britain needed to keep a deterrent to maintain a voice in international nuclear weapons negotiations, he told the Guardian. However, he added: "We must examine ways of delivering a weapon more cheaply."

Science: Global warming is raising the possibility of a devastating oil spill in the Arctic, as melting sea ice attracts more shipping and energy exploration. But the US is ill-prepared to prevent and recover from spills in this ecologically fragile region, say scientists and policymakers. So they are asking the US government to reinvigorate the national oil-spill research program with a focus on the Arctic.

Nature News: In 2003, the University of Rochester in New York launched a digital archive designed to preserve and share dissertations, preprints, working papers, photographs, music scores—just about any kind of digital data the university's investigators could produce.

At the time of the launch, the university librarians were worried that a flood of uploaded data might swamp the available storage space.

Six years later, the US$200,000 repository lies mostly empty.

Researchers had been very supportive of the archive idea, recalls Susan Gibbons, vice-provost and dean of the university's River Campus Libraries—especially as the alternative was to keep on scattering their data and dissertations across an ever-proliferating array of unintegrated computers and websites.

"So we spent all this money, we spent all this time, we got the software up and running, and then we said, 'OK, here it is. We're ready. Give us your stuff'," she says. "And that's where we hit the wall." When the time came, scientists couldn't find their data, or didn't understand how to use the archive, or lamented that they just didn't have any more hours left in the day to spend on this business.

A similar reality check has greeted other data-sharing efforts.

Most researchers happily embrace the idea of sharing. It opens up observations to independent scrutiny, fosters new collaborations and encourages further discoveries in old data sets.

But in practice those advantages often fail to outweigh researchers' concerns. What will keep work from being scooped, poached or misused? What rights will the scientists have to relinquish? Where will they get the hours and money to find and format everything?

Science: China was late to join the race to develop novel rare-earth materials. "We lag behind the world in applications," says Xu Guangxian of Peking University, a chemist who was detained by the Red Guard in the late 1960s before becoming a pioneer in separating rare earths from other minerals. But Western observers agree that China is catching up fast in areas such as fuel cells and magnetic refrigeration, thanks in part to research efforts now happening here at the Baotou Research Institute of Rare Earths (BRIRE). "Absolutely, they are gaining ground," says Clint Cox, an analyst at The Anchor House, a rare earths consulting firm in Chicago, Illinois. Today, about three-quarters of the world's neodymium magnets are made in China. Domestic industrial demand is rising: Last year, China consumed 60% of all processed rare earths.

That unnerves some industry analysts and US legislators, who have expressed concern about China's dominance of the rare-earth supply. Last year, China satisfied 95% of global demand--now about 125,000 tons per year—and holds more than half of all proven reserves. In the 1990s, China's cheap production costs sent prices plummeting, driving many non-Chinese rare-earth mines out of business. Prices started creeping up in 2005, however, when China began to limit production and slap export tariffs on some rare earths. In a policy paper last month, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology floated the idea of prohibiting export of three scarcer rare earths--europium, terbium, and dysprosium.

If the Chinese government were to implement such a policy, that "would be a big problem for other countries," says Judith Chegwidden, managing director of Roskill Information Services Ltd., a mining analysis company in London. China has a "natural monopoly" over heavier rare earths, she says, simply because few mines elsewhere have ample reserves.

NPR: Steven Chu is an optimist. The secretary of energy, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997, believes science can solve many of the nation's energy challenges.

"Scientists by their nature are very optimistic," he said. "We learn about Newton, about Maxwell, about Einstein. And yet you want to do some science that can contribute on the shoulders of those giants—you've got to be pretty optimistic.

"That doesn't mean I'm a cockeyed optimist," he cautioned. "You've still got to come up with the goods."

Chu knows cleaner coal, new nuclear power plants, more renewable energy will take time. In a conversation with NPR's Steve Inskeep, he lays out ambitious plans for the country's energy future.

Naturejobs: Scientists, postdocs, and students planning to travel to the US to work or study need two things before applying for a visa: time and patience.

Despite recent efforts by federal agencies to improve and accelerate the visa-application process—including adding staff and setting shorter waiting times—it still needs legislative and regulatory reform, say those who are familiar with the system. Many consider it to be a labyrinthine muddle of requirements and regulations. Delays of up to half a year are not uncommon, even with the processing improvements brought in to clear the backlog and speed procedures after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 forced a visa clampdown.

CNN.com: American children aren't necessarily getting smarter or dumber, but that might not be good enough to compete globally, according to numbers cited by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

He noted a special analysis put out by the National Center for Education Statistics that compares 15-year-old US students with students from other countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The report says that it found US students placed below average in math and science, and that 16 of the 29 other participating OECD member countries outperformed their US peers in terms of average scores.

Nature News: Nitrous oxide (N₂O) has become the greatest threat to the ozone layer, a new analysis in Science suggests. The ozone-destroying abilities of the gas have been largely ignored by policy-makers and atmospheric scientists alike, who have focused on the more potent chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)—historically the dominant ozone-depleting substances in the atmosphere.

Related Link
Nitrous Oxide (N₂O): The Dominant Ozone-Depleting Substance Emitted in the 21st Century

NPR: Iran's leaders say the country's nuclear program exists only for the purpose of generating electricity. Western intelligence agencies say the Islamic republic aims to produce nuclear weapons and intimidate its neighbors. How close is Iran to getting the bomb? How might it be stopped? And what are the implications for the United States and the rest of the world if Iran succeeds? This week, NPR looks at Iran and its suspected nuclear weapons programs in a series.

Related Link
Iran And The Bomb: US Keeps Options Open

Daily Telegraph: A draft report by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has called for a total ban on foreign shipments of terbium, dysprosium, yttrium, thulium, and lutetium. Other metals such as neodymium, europium, cerium, and lanthanum will be restricted to a combined export quota of 35,000 tonnes a year, far below global needs.

China mines over 95pc of the world's rare earth minerals, mostly in Inner Mongolia. The move to hoard reserves is the clearest sign to date that the global struggle for diminishing resources is shifting into a new phase. Countries may find it hard to obtain key materials at any price.

Rare metals play a vital role in most cutting edge technology, from hybrid cars and catalytic converters, to superconductors, and precision-guided weapons.

NYTimes.com: International Battery, a small start-up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, is developing a battery that is smaller than a cereal box but with nearly the energy of a conventional car battery.

This summer the Obama administration announced how it will distribute some $2.4 billion in stimulus grants to companies that make such advanced batteries for hybrid or all-electric vehicles and related components. International Battery is vying for a modest chunk of it.

The hope is that the grants will spur far higher levels of experimentation and production, pushing down the costs that have prevented these batteries from entering the mass market.

NYTimes.com: The biggest opportunity to improve the nation's energy situation is a major investment program to make homes and businesses more efficient, according to a study released by the consulting firm McKinsey. An investment of $520 billion in improvements like sealing ducts and replacing inefficient appliances could produce $1.2 trillion in savings on energy bills through 2020, the study found.

The report said such a program, if carried out over the next decade, could cut the country's projected energy use in 2020 by about 23 %, a savings that would be "greater than the total of energy consumption of Canada."

Slate: Acid rain has been a major problem since the Industrial Revolution. Acidification can cause imbalances in soil chemistry, exacerbating problems for watersheds and plant life, and threaten sensitive tree populations like the Red Spruce in the Northeast mountains.

The 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act require power plants make significant cuts on sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides emissions—which cause acid rain—by installing "scrubbers" in their smokestacks and switching to low-sulfur coal.

Cap-and-trade programs came online in 1995 for sulfur dioxide and 2003 for nitrogen oxides. Vehicles, which emit large amounts of nitrogen oxides, became cleaner thanks to the catalytic converters.

According to the National Emissions Inventory, sulfur dioxide emissions from all sources fell from nearly 26 million tons in 1980 to 11.4 million tons in 2008. Nitrogen oxides decreased from 27 million tons to 16.3 million tons in the same time frame.

However, despite these improvements, much of the rainwater in the East is between 2.5 and 8 times more acidic than it should be.

Nature News: When nations made plans to save the ozone layer, they didn't factor in global warming. Nature's Quirin Schiermeier reports on how two environmental problems complicate each other.

New York Times: As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gears up for its next climate review, many specialists in climate science and policy, both inside and out of the network, are warning that it could quickly lose relevance unless it adjusts its methods and focus.

There is scant evidence that nations are acting on its warnings; emissions of heat-trapping gases have grown; talks about a new climate treaty remain largely deadlocked.

Environmentalists assert that the reports by the panel are watered down by a requirement that sponsoring governments reach consensus line by line.

Some experts fret that the IPCC has failed to keep pace with an explosion of climate research.

At the same time, some scientists accuse the panel of cherry-picking studies and playing down levels of uncertainty about the severity of global warming.

"It just feels like the IPCC has gone from being a broker of science to a gatekeeper," said John R. Christy, a climate scientist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and a former panel author.

NYTimes.com: China’s envoy to global negotiations on climate change expressed optimism on Wednesday that a new agreement to reduce greenhouse gases would be reached this year, and he said that his nation’s efforts to curb carbon pollution already had produced results that he called “second to none.”

But the envoy, Yu Qingtai, also underscored China’s opposition to placing a ceiling on its emissions of greenhouse gases, a step that some experts have called crucial to efforts to slow global warming.

Physics Today: Physics Today is blogging the first meeting of the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. To follow the discussion or ask question, please visit http://friendfeed.com/pcast

A summary will be posted sometime later.

Nature News: The European Commission must make "immediate corrections" to the running of the European Research Council (ERC) or risk the body suffering a "deadly blow", an expert review has found.

On 23 July, a panel led by the former president of Latvia, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, published a review of the ERC—the first pan-European initiative to fund frontier research solely on the basis of excellence.

The ERC was established two years ago and is administered by an executive agency under the commission's control. The panel describes the council's management as a source of "great frustration and low-level conflict."

The Atlantic: As the threat of global warming grows more urgent, a few scientists are considering radical—and possibly extremely dangerous—schemes for reengineering the climate by brute force.

Their ideas are technologically plausible and quite cheap. So cheap, in fact, that a rich and committed environmentalist could act on them tomorrow. And that’s the scariest part says The Atlantic's Graeme Wood.

Related Physics Today articles
Geoengineering: What, how, and for whom? February 2009
Will desperate climates call for desperate geoengineering measures? August 2008

BBC News: The government is keeping scientists at "arm's length" and treating science as "a peripheral policy concern," a group of MPs has said.

The Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills committee says knowledge from experts is not being properly used to make informed policy decisions.

Instead of being sidelined, scientists should be able to communicate directly with the prime minister, it argues.

Former chief scientist Sir David King said reform was "critical".

A spokesman for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) rejected the accusation, arguing that science was fundamentally central to government operations.

NPR: In the last century, space exploration was dominated by the superpowers and developed nations. This century, developing nations, particularly in Asia, have begun rolling out ambitious space programs.

Chief among them is China, which in 2003 became the third country after the US and the Soviet Union to put a human in space. China may be a latecomer to the field, but it has big plans.

Science: Six years ago, the Italian government launched the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) with the grand goal of using scientific and engineering research to boost the country's struggling economy. It was established as a unique public-private research foundation, with government funding of about €50 million to €100 million a year for a decade—a huge investment for a country where researchers complain of chronic underfunding.

The institute now employs 380 scientists, based in a newly renovated massive lab building outside Genoa, and has external research centers at nine Italian universities, and in IIT-affiliated labs abroad.

IIT was expected to partner with Italian industry, but not a single Italian company has funded research with it so far, Cingolani confirmed to Science. And although Cingolani points to a string of positive evaluations by IIT's own scientific committee, the Italian government has declined to release a recent independent assessment of IIT that, according to its authors, is highly critical.

The Guardian: The UK's nuclear stockpile could be reduced after multilateral talks next year that are likely to flow from a global summit on nuclear weapons, says Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

The summit, to be convened by US president Barack Obama, is expected to come up with a new regime to prevent nuclear proliferation and ensure the safe storage of nuclear stockpiles. It is likely to involve up to 30 countries, providing an opportunity for discussion on a more intrusive weapons inspection regime and a chance for nuclear weapons states other than Russia and the US, which between them account for 95% of nuclear weapons, to contribute to the disarmament process.

Salon: As the debate over the Waxman–Markey climate bill rages on, Harvard's top environmental economist Robert Stavins sheds some light on how the bill will work.

csmonitor.com: In the past, national borders were determined by war, revolution, or, as is the case with many former colonies, someone in a pith helmet doodling on a map. But in the 21st century, the job could be done by global warming.

For instance, the 463-mile border between Italy and Switzerland runs mostly through the Alps, and has remained more or less fixed since Italy became a unified state in 1861.

Seeking to define the border more precisely, a 1941 convention between the two countries established the demarcation as running along the ridge crest of the glaciers in the mountain range.

But as the Alps experience the warmest period in 1,300 years, those glaciers are beginning to recede, moving the border northward. As the Discovery Channel reported in May, measurements taken at the Monte Rosa massif found that the border has shifted hundreds of feet in some places, with most of the change in the past five years. Now the two countries are at work redefining their boundaries, this time basing them on rock, not ice. Italy plans to make similar arrangements with France and Austria.

Guardian.co.uk: As concerns increase in the UK about the "dumbing down" of science education, the government has launched a consultation on the new GCSE science curriculum. Unfortunately the consultation process is happening when nearly all the teachers are on holiday.

As Alom Shaha, a science teacher and filmmaker, says on the Guardian's website:

There are not enough students going on to study science at A-level. Top universities are complaining about the low standard of the few students who do choose to study science beyond school. There's a shortage of good science teachers.

These factors combine to create a crisis that has damaging implications for the future of British science and the economy. The QCA consultation is an opportunity for science teachers to play a role in improving things and I think as many science teachers as possible should take part.

In that regard Shaha has created a website www.howscience.co.uk to make an easier way for teachers and interested parents to contribute to the consultation.

Nature News: Indian universities are likely to find themselves under a new oversight body, human resource development minister Kapil Sibal has announced.

Physicist Yash Pal led the committee that recommended setting up a six-member National Commission for Higher Education and Research (NCHER) to reform higher education. The commission would replace nearly a dozen regulatory bodies and bring all streams of higher education, including engineering, medicine, agriculture, and law, under its purview.

The Observer: More than 1,767 safety incidents have occurred at nuclear power plants in the UK between 2001-08 according to a report written by the government's chief nuclear inspector, Mike Weightman of the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII), and released under the UK's Freedom of Information Act.

About half were subsequently judged by inspectors as serious enough "to have had the potential to challenge a nuclear safety system". They were "across all areas of existing nuclear plant", including Sellafield in Cumbria and Aldermaston and Burghfield in Berkshire, says Weightman.

The Independent: Major nations have failed to agree to set a goal halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, according to a draft document ahead of talks tomorrow—a setback to efforts to secure a new UN climate pact.

Negotiations involving senior officials from the 17-nation Major Economies Forum broke down overnight after China and India opposed any mention of the target, a source familiar with negotiations told Reuters.

Slate.com: With oil-sands production at more than 1.2 million barrels per day, Canada, which also produces conventional oil, has quietly passed Saudi Arabia to become the top supplier to the US.

US government analysts expect that production could triple again by 2030 and could eventually deliver to the US as much as 37% of imported crude.

The local environmental fallout—in terms of deforestation, water demand, and toxic waste—varies among the dozens of ongoing extraction projects but is often immense.

In other words, US policymakers are now faced with an awkward problem: How do you balance improvements in energy security with worsening climate change, especially when dealing with a resource that isn't yours?

Related Physics Today article
Physics in the oil sands of Alberta

The Guardian: Consumers will need to pay more for energy if the UK is to have any chance of developing the technologies needed to tackle climate change, according to a Royal Society report.

The report said that the government must put research into alternatives to fossil fuel much higher among its priorities, and argued that current policy in the area was "half-hearted".

"We have adapted to an energy price which is unrealistically low if we're going to try and preserve the environment," John Shepherd, a climate scientist at Southampton University and co-author of the report said. "We have to allow the economy to adapt to higher energy prices through carbon prices and that will then make things like renewables and nuclear more economic, as carbon-based alternatives become more expensive."

Related Link
Towards a low carbon future

Physics Today: On Friday, the Democrats narrowly won passage in the House for the 1200-page American Clean Energy and Security Act by a 219–212 vote—two votes more than required.

The bill calls on the US to cut production of greenhouse gases by 17% of 1990 levels by 2020 and 83% by mid-century. Currently US greenhouse gas emissions are rising on average by 1% each year.

Despite statements on both sides of the aisle insisting that they want to combat climate change, a number of Republicans and Democrats have been mounting a rear-guard action to weaken the bill, particularly in its long and convoluted passage through the House Energy and Commerce committee.

The outcome depended on locking in the so-called "Blue Dog Democrats" and the number of moderate Republicans—despite pressure from Republican leadership to kill the bill (more).

In his weekly address President Obama hailed the bill and stated that he was looking forward to the Senate clearing passage "so that we can say, at long last, that this was the moment when we decided to confront America's energy challenge and reclaim America's future."

"As this legislation moves to the Senate, it is also important to consider its international implications," says Eileen Claussen of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change . "Enactment of a comprehensive energy and climate bill along the lines of the ACES Act will finally allow the US to help lead the efforts toward a global agreement in which the major economies of the world, both developed and developing, play their part to address the climate challenge."

Related Links
House narrowly passes climate change bill Physics Today
House Passes Bill to Address Threat of Climate Change New York Times
Climate Change Activists Dismayed by Some of Bill's Provisions Washington Post

Nature News: This week, in the hallways of a conference in Guiyang, China, Nicola Pirrone—the director of Italy's CNR-Institute for Atmospheric Pollution Research—will be trying to rustle up more support for a global network to monitor mercury pollution.

Such a network would underlie a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) treaty to control mercury emissions, which negotiators plan to forge by 2013.

Researchers are facing a complex task—how to monitor 2,500 tonnes of mercury every year, more than half of which comes from fossil-fuel power plants—on what may be shoestring budgets.

But so far, global monitoring endeavors have been relatively uncoordinated; hundreds of sporadic efforts can include one-time samplings from a ship cruise or aeroplane flight.

BBC NEWS: Half of England's comprehensives—a type of school that provides the majority of middle-to-high school education in England—did not offer physics, chemistry, and biology GCSEs last year.

In two regions—Islington and Slough—not a single pupil studied the separate sciences.

GCSEs are taken by all high school students in the UK around the age of 16. Pupils have to make a decision when they are 14 over which GCSE subjects to study.

In the new curriculum introduced last year, most schools do a core science GCSE with "additional science" for those who are interested.

Separate or "triple" science GCSEs have largely become the preserve of grammar schools and private schools.

The lack of specific GCSEs is having an affect on the next level of exams taken by students at 17 to 18 years old, and university lecturers worry that it will impact the level of knowledge students have when they start earning science degrees at university.

In a separate story BBC Education Editor Gary Eason says that in a lecture in February this year, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he wanted to double the number of pupils in state schools taking triple science to 100,000 a year, by 2014, but although students are entitled to be offered three GCSEs in the sciences—physics, chemistry, and biology—there is no legal requirement for schools to offer courses.

Related News Picks
Chengdu earthquake aftershocks proving impossible to predict
Spy satellites monitor China's nuclear weapon sites for earthquake damage
The Chengdu Earthquake

Confirmation of the leaks raises new questions about the MoD's safety record, which has been coming under increasing scrutiny since HMS Vanguard, a British submarine armed with Trident nuclear missiles, collided with a nuclear-armed French submarine, Le Triomphant, under the Atlantic in February.

Two weeks ago, Chu said that "the total price tag will be about $25 billion." But Barry Barish, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena who directs the ILC Global Design Effort, says that figure is likely an overestimate and that the US would pay only a fraction of the total anyway. He worries that when Department of Energy (DOE) officials quote such huge numbers, they undermine the project's chance of winning congressional support. "If it turns off all dialogue [with other officials] then it hurts us," Barish says. Still, Barish says he's optimistic that Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, will approach the project with an open mind.

Environmental News Network: A two-day workshop was held this week (May 11–12) between the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Japan's Ministry of Environment (MOEJ), and Japan's Institute for Global Environmental Strategies to discuss key climate change issues.

The scheme aims to deal with a glut of unemployed postdocs in the nation. The number of academic posts available to them has shrunk since the 1990s, as a result of government streamlining in the university system.

The Boston Globe: Ask most Americans about former President Jimmy Carter and energy, and they'll probably recall the long gas lines during the 1970s Arab oil embargo and the 1979 "malaise" speech in which he outlined his plan for energy efficiency and reducing oil imports.

Tuesday, he is being called upon to offer a "historical review"of US efforts to address energy security before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Today, claims the thinktank Civitas in a collection of essays published to mark the 50th anniversary of Snow's lecture, we face a far worse crisis than the one Snow outlined. In the end, he was talking about a difference in tone and style among groups of highly educated people. Now, say the authors of From Two Cultures to No Culture, the very survival of serious education is at stake.

The Washington Post: Iran sharply criticized the United States, Britain and France on Monday for "continuous nuclear cooperation" with Israel, saying support for the Jewish state was a source of concern for the entire Middle East.

Associated Press: The primary US lab for renewable energy will receive $110 million in federal stimulus funds and another $83 million will go toward wind energy and other alternative power and efficiency projects, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Wednesday.

The Associated Press: Former Republican Senator John Warner of Virginia says dealing with climate change is a national security issue that must be addressed.

The New York Times: Obama administration officials said Wednesday that an ambitious energy and climate-change proposal sponsored by House Democrats could help create jobs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but they stopped short of endorsing it.

If built, the 460-mile line would carry about 3,000 megawatts of power, enough to avoid the need for a handful of coal-fired plants and to help utilities meet mandated targets for use of renewable fuel. "We have to connect the sun of the deserts and the winds of the plains to places where people live," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said recently.

But the line would also cross grasslands, skirt two national wildlife refuges and traverse the Rio Grande, all habitat areas rich in wildlife. The graceful sandhill crane, for example, makes its winter home in the wetlands of New Mexico's Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, right next to the path of the proposed power line. And much of the area falls under the protection of the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

And yet, Oxford's particle physics department has not awarded her a research council grant for her studies. Instead, the grant has gone to a British student, as has been the case for the last four years, give or take the few times when British students have turned down places at Oxford.

Meanwhile, Doglioni has spent months trying to secure funds from charities and other sources to see her through her PhD - months that the 24-year-old Italian could have been spending on her research into why we are made of matter.

This year - her first - Rotary International has funded her fees and the majority of her living expenses. Next year, she has secured an Oxford University scholarship to cover her costs. But she has no idea yet how she is going to fund her third year. "You have to prepare yourself for a graceful fall," she says.

It's a situation Huffman deeply regrets, but can do little about. Research councils - non-departmental governmental bodies that fund thousands of PhDs every year - stipulate that only UK PhD students can receive a grant that covers their living expenses as well as their tuition fees. PhD students from the EU, like Doglioni, are only entitled to a grant that covers their tuition fees.

Vincenzo Raimo, director of the international office of the University of Nottingham, says: "If the UK is prioritising research, particularly in maths and science, which we claim to be doing, we ought to be getting the best people irrespective of where they come from. It would also make us much more competitive.A pool of excellent students from the EU may be going elsewhere because they cannot afford to live and study for a PhD in the UK.

The Washington Post: Fuming at the UN Security Council for condemning its recent missile launch, North Korea said Tuesday it will restart its plutonium factory, junk all its disarmament agreements, and "never participate" again in six-country nuclear negotiations.

Nature: President Barack Obama's appointment of academic scientists and economists to positions of high authority in his administration has created the sort of excitement in universities and among researchers that has not been seen for eight years. Certainly, after George W. Bush's grudging agreement to a constricted program of stem-cell research and his politicization of scientific findings about the environment, Obama's choice of prominent scholars is a breath of fresh air.

Yet before the country's, or indeed the world's, academics become too excited about the latest professors at the White House, they would do well to recall that US presidents have repeatedly turned to academic stars for advice during the past century, with mixed results. That academics have an imperfect record as presidential advisers is not to doubt that their expertise has considerable value. But no one should assume that an impressive academic track record guarantees good policy. Far more important is an ability to remain independent and offer advice based on sound evidence.

The Washington Post: Days after the Obama administration unveiled a push to combat climate change, Indian officials said it was unlikely to prompt them to agree to binding emission cuts, a position among emerging economies that many say derails effective action.

Sarkar is one of thousands of highly skilled scientists, professors and technology workers from Beijing to Belarus who have been stranded in their home countries in recent months, upsetting their lives, their jobs and their children's schooling. Many wonder whether the United States still wants its foreign scientists.

To avoid hanging separately, say scientists and managers in the United States and Europe, the two agencies must agree to hang together in an unprecedented partnership. This summer they intend to unveil a sweeping plan for a decade of collaboration that could kick off with a joint 2016 mission and culminate a decade later in the return of a martian sample to Earth. "This is a big change," says David Southwood, ESA science chief. "But we have to think about Mars differently." Adds his counterpart at NASA, Edward Weiler: "We've got to do this together."

Environmental News Network: The US Environmental Protection Agency is adding nine new hazardous waste sites that pose risks to human health and the environment to the National Priorities List of Superfund sites. Also, EPA is proposing to add 13 other sites to the list. Superfund is the federal program that investigates and cleans up the most complex, uncontrolled or abandoned hazardous waste sites in the country.

The Washington Post: NASA has a space station, three space shuttles, two moon rockets under development, a fleet of robotic space probes, dozens of satellites, tens of thousands of employees and a budget that is creeping toward $20 billion a year. What it needs is a boss.

The New York Times: Arizona Republican John McCain said today that he will promote amendments to a Senate energy bill that would abandon the Yucca Mountain, Nev., nuclear waste dump and refund about $16 billion in waste fees to electricity ratepayers.

Forty years later, UCS has 80,000 members and a staff of 130 working in four cities. The organization campaigns to shrink nuclear arsenals, fight global warming, and reduce agriculture's harm to the environment. For 8 years, it was a thorn in the side of the Bush Administration, criticizing White House policies and zinging its appointees for "politicizing science." That aggressive approach raised its visibility and helped triple its budget this decade, to almost $20 million.

But just as some MIT faculty members of yesteryear ignored the teach-ins and went ahead with their normal duties, some scientists believe that UCS cannot claim to be the conscience of the scientific community. "Many of its statements and conclusions … were perverse oversimplifications of complex issues," says John Marburger III, science adviser to President George W. Bush and a frequent target of UCS attacks. "I think it's hard, maybe impossible, for an advocacy organization to be entirely science-based.

Los Angeles Times: In a move that could pit environmentalists and alternative energy industries against each other, the senator wants hundreds of thousands of acres in California designated as a national monument.

"Leadership in science remains vital to America's economic prosperity, energy security, and global competitiveness," said Chu at a lunchtime press conference. "These projects not only provide critically needed short-term economic relief but also represent a strategic investment in our nation's future. They will create thousands of jobs and breathe new life into many local economies, while helping to accelerate new technology development, renew our scientific and engineering workforce, and modernize our nation's scientific infrastructure."

The money will mainly be directed to the 10 national laboratories run by DOE. The package also provides substantial support for both university- and DOE-based researchers, working on problems in fields ranging from particle and plasma physics to biofuels, solar energy, superconductivity, solid-state lighting, electricity storage, and materials science, among others.

The news came days after the Obama administration announced that current BP chief scientist Steve Koonin will serve as undersecretary of science at DOE. He would replace Ray Orbach once the position receives Senate confirmation.

Included among the approved projects are the following:

• $150 million to accelerate ongoing construction on the National Synchrotron Light Source-II at Brookhaven National Laboratory, in Upton, New York.

• $123 million for major construction, modernization, and needed decommissioning of laboratory facilities at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL); Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL); and Brookhaven National Laboratory.

• $65 million to accelerate construction of the 12-Billion Electron Volt Upgrade of the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF) in Newport News, Virginia.

• $277 million for Energy Frontier Research Centers, to be awarded on a competitive basis to universities and DOE National Laboratories across the country. These centers will accelerate the transformational basic science needed to develop plentiful and cost-effective alternative energy sources and will pursue advanced fundamental research in fields ranging from solar energy to nuclear energy systems, biofuels, geological sequestration of carbon dioxide, clean and efficient combustion, solid-state lighting, superconductivity, hydrogen research, electrical energy storage, catalysis for energy, and materials under extreme conditions.

• $90 million for other core research, providing support for graduate students, postdocs, and PhD scientists across the nation.

• $69 million to create a national scale, prototype 100-gigabit per second data network linking research centers across the nation.

• $330 million for operations and equipment at Office of Science major scientific user facilities, including ORNL's Spallation Neutron Source; the Nanoscale Science Research Centers, located at five national laboratories nationwide; the ARM Climate Research Facility; Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory; and Linac Coherent Light Source at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SNAL).

In addition, the Recovery Act funding provides $125 million for needed infrastructure improvements across nine DOE national laboratories: Ames Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, LBNL, ORNL, PNNL, SNAL, and TJNAF.

Related Links
Further information

The New York Times: President Obama has made clean and efficient energy a top priority, and Congress has obliged with more than $32 billion in stimulus money mostly for conservation and alternative energy technologies like wind, solar and biofuel. Sadly, the Energy Department is too weighed down by nuclear energy programs to devote itself to bringing about the revolution Mr. Obama envisions, writes Stephanie Cooke in the New York Times.

It is a dire scene being echoed at campuses across the United States as public universities struggle through the annual legislative budget processes in the worsening economic downturn. Private universities are facing their own challenges, including plummeting endowments1 and shrinking philanthropic gifts. The problem for public universities (see graphic), though, is especially acute in the sunbelt states such as Arizona, where the burst of the housing bubble has hit tax revenues hard and slashed the budgets of universities that, until recently, had ambitious expansion plans.

Dr. Shkumatava, who ended up traveling to Moscow for a visa, is among the several hundred thousand students who need a visa to study in the United States. People at universities and scientific organizations who study the issue say they have heard increasing complaints of visa delays since last fall, particularly for students in science engineering and other technical fields.

A State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that delays of two or three months were common and attributed the problem to "an unfortunate staffing shortage."

The issue matters because American universities rely on foreign students to fill slots in graduate and postdoctoral science and engineering programs. Foreign talent also fuels scientific and technical innovation in American labs. And the United States can no longer assume that this country is everyone's first choice for undergraduate, graduate or postgraduate work.

The twin announcements marked a clear departure from former President George W. Bush's approach to science, which had caused a rift between that administration and a large segment of the nation's research community. Many complained that scientific data had been ignored or skewed as the Bush administration set policy on climate change, oil and gas drilling, and other aspects of environmental and health policy. According to Stephanie Condon at CNet news, it also "reopens the debate over how well science and politics should mix"

Richard Jones of the American Institute of Physics says Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, who was at the President’s side as the Memorandum was signed, released a statement that in part said, “President Obama also made clear today that his commitment to decisions based on science instead of ideology extends beyond stem cell research -- tasking every agency to ensure that sound science is at the heart of decisions we make. From energy to environmental protection to health care reform, Americans will be well served by this approach.”

The Washington Post: When President Obama lifts restrictions on funding for human embryonic stem cell research today, he will also issue a presidential memorandum aimed at insulating scientific decisions across the federal government from political influence, officials said yesterday.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) has placed a "hold" that blocks votes on confirming Holdren, who is in line to lead the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Lubchenco, Obama's nominee to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

According to the Washington Post, Menendez is using the holds as leverage to get Senate leaders' attention for a matter related to Cuba rather than questioning the nominees' credentials.

However, as most community colleges do not have a dedicated Earth sciences department, students will not get an opportunity to get the necessary background or skills to work in this area says reporter Trina Hoaks.

For that investment, the region has attracted $23.4 million in outside research grants and applied for $35.8 million more. The investment has also generated about 100 jobs and created partnerships with dozens of private fuel cell companies or industries working with the technology.

And later this month, the National Hydrogen Association will bring more than 1,000 researchers, manufacurers and government officials to Columbia for its annual conference and expo.

Boosters say that’s not bad for being in only the fourth year of a 20-year plan to turn the Columbia area into a national center of hydrogen research, part of a statewide push to make hydrogen pay.

But critics, including S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford, say that too much money has been spent on a technology that might not be the wave of the future.

"Demand is growing for credible, understandable and useful information for responding to climate change," says the report, called Restructuring Federal Climate Research to Meet the Challenges of Climate Change. The report, released Thursday, calls for "transformation" of climate science to emphasize the climate's influence on food, economics and public health.

Otherwise, there's lots of evidence that politicians will tackle such practical problems without scientists.

"We will invest more than at any time in our country's history to make the next decade a decade where British scientific genius can create the low-carbon, high-skill, digital economy that we need," said Brown, speaking at the University of Oxford.

The Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, was widely viewed as badly flawed. Many countries that signed the accord lagged far behind their targets in curbing carbon dioxide emissions. The United States refused even to ratify it. And the treaty gave a pass to major emitters in the developing world like China and India.

But within weeks of taking office, President Obama has radically shifted the global equation, placing the United States at the forefront of the international climate effort and raising hopes that an effective international accord might be possible. Mr. Obama’s chief climate negotiator, Todd Stern, said last week that the United States would be involved in the negotiation of a new treaty — to be signed in Copenhagen in December — “in a robust way.”

The New York Times: Bush administration standards for pollutants like soot are "contrary to law and unsupported by adequately reasoned decisionmaking," a federal appeals court said Tuesday.

Ars Technica: In a sign that the appointment of Steven Chu means that the DOE will not be taking a business-as-usual approach, the Department announced a series of steps that will streamline the process of using the stimulus money to get projects started.

NPR: An all-star cast of politicians, business people and activists sat down Monday in Washington, D.C., to discuss how to transform the nation's energy supply from dirty to clean. The consensus was that it will take a much better system for distributing electricity coast to coast. Participants agreed there are plenty of challenges to doing that.

Guardian Unlimited : Environment ministers overcame seven years of obstacles today and committed to reducing the world's mercury pollution.

Carbon dioxide and other gases added to the air by industrial and other activities have been blamed for rising temperatures, increasing worries about possible major changes in weather and climate.

Carbon emissions have been growing at 3.5% per year since 2000, up sharply from the 0.9% per year in the 1990s, Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution for Science told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

"It is now outside the entire envelope of possibilities" considered in the 2007 report of the International Panel on Climate Change, he said.

International Herald Tribune: Steven Chu, the new secretary of energy, said Wednesday that solving the world's energy and environment problems would require Nobel-level breakthroughs in three areas: electric batteries, solar power, and the development of new crops that can be turned into fuel.

Related Links
How to avoid contaminating planetary neighbors NPR

Houston Chronicle: A longtime congressional critic of the oil and gas industry said Monday that there may be a place for expanded offshore drilling and a long future for coal in the US, but only with caution and a lot of investment.

The Associated Press: The Obama administration, reversing the Bush administration's limited interest in nuclear disarmament, is gearing up for early negotiations with Russia on a new treaty that would sharply reduce stockpiles of nuclear warheads.

In a study published today in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions, earth systems scientist Tim Lenton of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom and a graduate student analyzed 17 schemes for cooling the planet.

Guardian Unlimited: Tehran claims to be joining the space race but the west has its suspicions

Calling the country’s higher-education system ill-adapted to the challenges of knowledge and growth in the 21st century, Mr. Sarkozy said France trailed other industrialized nations in research and innovation because “too often we have retreated from the necessity of reforming our universities and research institutions.”

On Wednesday, Gore returned to the Senate to offer advice about how to arrive at a different outcome as a new climate treaty is negotiated this year in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The New York Times: When he vowed in his Inaugural Address to "restore science to its rightful place," President Obama signaled an end to eight years of stark tension between science and government.

CNN: The United States signed an agreement Thursday on civil nuclear cooperation with the United Arab Emirates -- the first such pact with a Middle Eastern country.

Environmental News Network:
Tackling climate change and its consequences, reforming the EU's Common Agricultural Policy, improving air quality, and reducing the environmental impact of biofuels will top the bloc's environmental policy debates in the coming year, according to the European Environment Agency (EEA).

US News & World Report: The White House on Monday released a long-awaited document broadly laying out U.S. policy toward the Arctic, a region whose potential for oil, gas, and mineral exploitation is for the first time being unlocked by a historic ice melt driven by climate change.

The Washington Post: President Bush last year rejected an Israeli request to provide sophisticated, deep-penetration bombs to attack Iran's underground nuclear enrichment facilities, Pentagon officials said yesterday.

The Independent: An emergency "Plan B" using the latest technology is needed to save the world from dangerous climate change, according to a poll of leading scientists carried out by The Independent. The collective international failure to curb the growing emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has meant that an alternative to merely curbing emissions may become necessary.

The plan would involve highly controversial proposals to lower global temperatures artificially through daringly ambitious schemes that either reduce sunlight levels by man-made means or take CO2 out of the air. This "geoengineering" approach – including schemes such as fertilising the oceans with iron to stimulate algal blooms – would have been dismissed as a distraction a few years ago but is now being seen by 54% of the scientists they surveyed as a viable emergency backup plan that could save the planet from the worst effects of climate change, at least until deep cuts are made in CO2 emissions.

"This is the first paper in the scientific literature that explicitly melds the two vital issues of global peak oil production and human-induced climate change," Kharecha said. "We're illustrating the types of action needed to get to target carbon dioxide levels."

His new book The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and Its Proliferation, co-written with Danny Stillman, the former director of the technical intelligence division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, rewrites much of the public understanding about how countries with nuclear weapons came to acquire them. All countries that built bombs, including the United States, spied on or were given access to the work of other nuclear powers. In particular, the book is a scathing indictment of the Chinese government, alleging that it intentionally proliferated nuclear technology to risky regimes, particularly Pakistan.

Related Physics Today Article
The Chinese nuclear tests, 1964–1996 by Thomas C. Reed

Related Physics Today Article
The Chinese nuclear tests, 1964–1996 by Thomas C. Reed

The New York Times: The Joint BioEnergy Institute, which encompasses the fourth floor of a high-tech office building here in a neighborhood of biotech companies, radiates a sleek ecological modernity: floorboards manufactured of recycled materials and laminated to look like bamboo, trendy office furniture and laboratories stocked with new equipment.

The Washington Post: President-elect Barack Obama has selected two of the nation's most prominent scientific advocates for a vigorous response to climate change to serve in his administration's top ranks, according to sources, sending the strongest signal yet that he will reverse Bush administration policies on energy and global warming.

Related link:
John Holdren expected to be announced as science adviser

The New York Times: The team President-elect Barack Obama introduced on Monday to carry out his energy and environmental policies faces a host of political, economic, diplomatic and scientific challenges that could impede his plans to address global warming and America's growing dependence on dirty and uncertain sources of energy.

Related links:

Obama Names Energy, Environmental Team
NPR

Physics Today: President-elect Obama's transition team is expected to shortly announce that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu will be nominated as secretary of energy, while Lisa Jackson, a former environmental policy official in New Jersey, has been picked to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Carol Browner, who led the EPA under President Clinton, will fill a new White House "energy czar" role. The announcements came from Democratic officials on Wednesday night.

Chu, who will be the first Nobel Prize winner to be appointed to the US cabinet, is the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and has played a key role in moving the lab in the direction of specializing in renewable energy, particularly in the field of new fuels for transportation. LBNL is experimenting with making biofuels from different types of biomass, using algae in fermentation tanks to make fuel, and applying solar energy to convert water and carbon dioxide to fuels. "[President-elect Obama] certainly needs somebody who can focus on the science and energy policies and I can't think of a better guy than Steve," says Mike Lubell from the American Physical Society.

Originally his father wanted him to be an architect as "the competition in physics was too strong." Chu did both his graduate and postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley. He then spent nine years at Bell Labs before joining Stanford University's physics department where he remained between 1987-2004. He shared the 1997 Nobel Prize with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Phillips for cooling and trapping atoms with lasers.

During the presidential campaign, Obama said he would invest $150 billion over 10 years in clean energy and proposed requiring that 10 percent of electricity in the United States comes from renewable sources by 2012. Chu, has been one of the most public faces of promoting renewable energy. At the National Clean Energy Summit held in August, Chu said "I think political will is absolutely necessary. But we need new technologies."

Chu is also one of the co-authors of the 2006 National Academy of Sciences' report Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future, in which he lobbied for the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) at the Department of Energy as a way of funding risky hich-tech technologies to solve the US energy crisis. ARPA-E, although legislation creating its existence has passed into law, has yet to be receive a budget as the proposal is not supported by the Bush administration. Chu's appointment increases the likelihood that the ARPA-E will finally be created.

The largest part of the Department of Energy's budget however, goes towards maintaining the nuclear weapons stockpile. It is too early to say what the implications are for Chu's appointment to the long term future of the three main nuclear weapons labs at Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia. According to the Wall Street Journal, Chu is likely to focus his attention on the Energy Department's core missions: basic science, nuclear weapons and cleaning up a nuclear-weapons manufacturing complex contaminated since the Cold War.

Related Physics Today articles
Chu Named Berkeley Lab Director (August 2004)
Politicians skeptical about need for ARPA-E (June 2006)
'Gathering Storm' Report Urges Strong Federal Action to Save US Science and Technology Leadership December 2005
Could 'green gasoline' displace ethanol as the biofuel of choice? December 2008
Blueprint for new energy institute February 2007

Related Physics Today science articles
Laser Beam Focus Forms Optical Trap for Neutral Atoms September 1986
New Mechanisms for Laser Cooling October 1990
Atom Interferometers Prove Their Worth in Atomic Measurements July 1995
Work on Atom Trapping and Cooling Gets a Warm Reception in Stockholm December 1997
Atom Interferometer Measures G with Same Accuracy as Optical Devices November 1999
How the Laser Happened: Adventures of a Scientist December 1999 (review by Steven Chu)

Related Web LInks
Nobel Winner Chu To Land Top Energy Post (NPR)
Obama Team Set on Environment New York TImes
Obama Picks Team to Guide Energy, Environment Agendas Wall Street Journal
Steve Chu, Sixth Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Obama Said to Pick Nobel Laureate Chu as Energy Chief Bloomberg
Nobel Physicist Chosen To Be Energy Secretary Washington Post

The Associated Press: The Bush administration said Tuesday there are no technology constraints to a major expansion of the proposed nuclear waste site in Nevada, calling for possibly tripling the amount of highly radioactive used reactor fuel that could be stored there in manmade underground caverns.

But all is not well for ITER. "To keep momentum, ITER needs the collective efforts and continued support from its members, laying the foundations for a new model of global scientific collaboration," said Kaname Ikeda, director-general of the ITER Organization, in a statement at the meeting.

The bad news comes from the United States which, "cannot live up to our commitments" to ITER, the Energy Department's Gene Nardella told an advisory committee earlier this month. Congress allocated only $20.5 million for the project, just enough for staffing, instead of a requested $214 million for 2009. A National Research Council panel in June warned, "The lack of funding stability will make it difficult for the U.S. to effectively participate in ITER, and ultimately, to access and thus benefit from the valuable scientific and technical knowledge to be gained from the facility."

San Francisco Chronicle: Despite new signals from President-elect Barack Obama and Congress that they may defy predictions of delay by pressing forward with legislation on global warming, California's role as the key battleground for climate policy is greater than ever - and local communities will be on the front line.

Environmental News Network: President-elect Obama will shred the Bush administration's energy policies and introduce a major climate change bill in an attempt to bring the US back into the international environment fold according to his senior advisers.

The Washington Post: The Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety and Health Administration have among the most restrictive policies in the federal government on releasing scientific information to the press and public, according to a "report card" being issued today by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

MSNBC: Look close to see how campaigns differ on stem cells, climate, and more.

USA Today: The Pentagon wants to rocket troops through space to hot spots anywhere on the globe within two hours, and planners spent two days last month discussing how to do it, military documents show.

The New York Times: With the Bush administration, no bad idea ever dies. So it should be no surprise that the Pentagon and the Department of Energy have released a new policy paper — pitched to the next president — arguing the case for a new nuclear warhead.

ScienceNow: US science agencies will receive no budget increases until March 2009 at the earliest after Congress voted over the weekend to freeze spending for every federal program outside of national security and veterans affairs. For many agencies, that means a second year of little or no growth.

Building offshore turbines to exploit it however, would leave Mandelstam against the local power companies, who didn't want the competition, and holiday resorts who didn't want their coastline view spoiled with windmills in the distance. It would lead to millions of dollars spent fighting one of the most protracted political battles in Delaware history, and the proposal to build a 200-megawatt wind farm off the coast of Delaware.

Mark Svenvold looks at the politics behind wind power, why states are shaping the state of the national energy grid, and the need for federal regulation and subsidies for renewable energy.

The Wall Street Journal: The Bush administration, seeking to secure a landmark nuclear-cooperation deal with India before its term expires, will push Congress to pass the required legislation by the end of the month.

The Wall Street Journal: The Bush administration, escalating its response to Russia's actions in Georgia, has placed under review talks with Moscow focused on missile defense and nuclear-weapons disarmament, according to U.S. officials.

"The systems that generate elections and earthquakes are complex systems," said Keilis-Borok, who is now a professor of earth sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles. "They are not predictable by simple equations, but after coarse-graining -- averaging -- they become predictable."

In a paper in the International Journal of Forecasting, Lichtman predicted a political earthquake this November: The incumbent party will crumble, and Sen. Barack Obama will be elected president.

The heads of three influential groups, the Sierra Club, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Natural Resources Defense Council, representing more than 2 million members, have written to the foreign secretary, David Miliband, warning that the UK proposals for up to eight new coal plants threatens the chance of the US joining a post-Kyoto international agreement to be agreed in 2009.

A recent report by the IPPR said the European Union's goal of reducing emissions from the power sector and heavy industry through its emissions trading scheme would collapse if the go-ahead were given to seven new coal plants in the UK and up to 75 across Europe./p>

The question is whether they can meet a 1 October deadline for completing a critical part of their increasingly complex simulation of the interplay of Earth's atmosphere, oceans, land, and ice. "We're all very nervous," says atmospheric modeler Philip Rasch, who works remotely for the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in nearby Boulder and who oversees the atmospheric component of the model. A big reason for the concern is the budget cuts that have affected the center, which hosts and manages CCSM.

The proposed plan, which was sent as a document to the presidential campaigns of John McCain and Barack Obama, would cost the nation about $9 billion above the current $10 billion already allotted for fiscal years 2010-2014.

The groups include the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union.

"With more than a quarter of the U.S. gross national product sensitive to weather and climate, these events substantially impact our national health, safety, economy, environment, transportation systems, and military readiness," the document states.

The document stressed the need for more research in five areas:

• Observations. Fully fund the Earth observing system from satellite and ground-based instruments as recommended by the National Research Council.
• Computing. Greatly increase the computer power available for weather and climate research, predictions and related applications.
• Research and Modeling. Support a broad fundamental and applied research program in Earth sciences and related fields to advance present understanding of weather and climate and their impacts on society.
• Societal Relevance. Support education, training and communication efforts to use the observations, models and application tools for the maximum benefit of society.
• Leadership and Management. Implement effective leadership, management and evaluation approaches to ensure that these investments are done in the best interest of the nation.

Various: The FBI has released details about its case against accused researcher Bruce Ivins, who killed himself last week after being told he would be prosecuted as the prime suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks. A number of websites have provided some analysis of the FBI's case. The Smoking Gun has collated the highlights to the prosecution's case. Meryl Nass, a noted anthrax researcher, writes on her blog Anthrax Vaccine that “What came out today was another pastiche of innuendo and circumstantial evidence, with an awful lot of holes.”

Nass raises the following main questions:

1. Ivins had just been immunized against anthrax. He was required to have yearly immunizations, and some anthrax scientists have chosen to be vaccinated every six months for safety, since the vaccine’s efficacy is weak — and Ivins had proven its weakness in several animal models. In his career he had probably received about 33 separate anthrax vaccinations.

2. Earlier in the week, anonymous officials at the FBI leaked to the press that the envelopes came from the specific post office he frequented. Today the affidavit states it is "reasonable to conclude" they were purchased in Maryland or Virginia.

3. Choosing a strain that would direct suspicion at Ivins. The perpetrator(s) were tremendously careful to leave no clues vis a vis the envelopes. For example, block lettering was used, which is the hardest to identify with handwriting analysis. Second, stamped envelopes were chosen to avoid using saliva. Third, there were no fingerprints on anything.

Why would the person(s) who took such care select an anthrax strain that would focus suspicion on himself? In 2001, strain analysis was possible. It had been discussed many times as a forensic tool for biowarfare, including in a paper Nass wrote in 1992, which Ivins had read, and in which Nass thanked him for his contributions.

4. Ivins was the “sole custodian” of the strain. But the strain was grown in 1997, and more than 100 people had access to it over that four year period. Having received a sample, or obtained it surreptitiously, they would be “custodians” of it too.

Nass also points out that the FBI report does not explain how the anthrax was weaponized, nor can explain how Ivins created it. The FBI also cannot explain how the letters were mailed from Princeton. "Either Ivins had an alibi or he didn't.... If Ivins cannot be placed in New Jersey on those dates, he is not the attacker, or he did not act alone," says Nass.

Update: 8/19/2008. The FBI release some of the evidence related to their investigation. NPR's David Kestenbaum provides some details of the case, along with New York Times reporters Eric Lichtblau and Nicholas Wade. Although some of the techniques have been reviewed, the research has yet to be independently verified by experts not associated to the case. Richard O. Spertzel, a retired microbiologist who led the United Nations’ biological weapons inspections of Iraq, told the New York Times that he remained skeptical of the bureau’s argument despite the new evidence. “It’s a pretty tenuous argument,” Spertzel said, adding that he questioned the bureau’s claim that the powder was less than military grade. Nass adds some more questions to the coverage

Nature News: Representatives of nine national space agencies signed an agreement on 24 July to create an International Lunar Network, which aims to plant a system of six or more seismic stations on the Moon.

Various: Microbiologist Bruce E. Ivins, 62, died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital in Maryland. He was believed to have taken a massive dose of prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine after the FBI told him that he was going to be indicted as part of the investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks.

According to the Associated Press, prosecutors were seeking the death penalty as part of the indictment.

Ivin's lawyer, Paul F. Kemp, who has represented Ivins for the past year, issued a statement asserting Ivins' innocence.

"For more than a year, we have been privileged to represent Dr. Bruce Ivins during the investigation of the anthrax deaths of September and October of 2001," Kemp said. "We assert his innocence in these killings, and would have established that at trial."

"The relentless pressure of accusation and innuendo takes its toll in different ways on different people, as has already been seen in this investigation. In Dr. Ivins' case, it led to his untimely death. We ask that the media respect the privacy of his family, and allow them to grieve."

Ivins worked for the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, at Fort Detrick in Maryland. Ivin's was an expertise on anthrax and has been called on by the FBI to analyze the anthrax spores that were sent through the mail to media organizations and politicians shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks. The anthrax letters killed 5 people and sickened 17.

In 2003 Ivins received the highest honor given to Defense Department civilian employees for helping solve technical problems in the manufacture of anthrax vaccine.

According to the LA Times, which broke the story, Ivins began showing signs of “serious strain” shortly after the government’s $5.8 million settlement with Steven J. Hatfill, who for many years, was the main suspect in the case, a fact that was leaked to the press and damaged his career.

After Ivins had expressed suicidal thoughts to a therapist he was seeing to treat depression, his access to sensitive work at the government labs was curtailed, and he was subsequently hospitalized for depression.

Ivins was released from the hospital on July 24, but he was facing the prospect of forced retirement, according to a colleague, who described him as “emotionally fractured” by the government scrutiny.

USA Today published a story in 2004 on Ivins and his casual nature nature in dealing with suspect anthrax contamination in a colleague's office.

In 2003, Physics Today published some of the research connected to the investigation.

Related Physics Today articles
Technical and Policy Issues of Counterterrorism--A Primer for Physicists May 2003
National Labs Focus on Tools against Terrorism in Wake of Airliner and Anthrax Attacks January 2002

Related News Stories
Anthrax suspect dies in apparent suicide LA Times
Report: Md. Anthrax Scientist Dies in Apparent Suicide Washington Post
Scientist Suspected of Anthrax Attacks Said to Kill Himself Associated Press
Death Of Suspect In Anthrax Attacks Called Suicide NPR

Nature News: Can the Chinese government meet its ambitious targets on space, the environment, research, energy and health? David Cyranoski takes a look at China today and what it hopes to be tomorrow.

Nature News: Many of the research projects launched as part of the International Polar Year (IPY), which runs from March 2007 to March 2009, are under threat because of the steep rise in marine-fuel costs. Hundreds of Arctic and Antarctic scientists face uncertainty as polar science programmes worldwide are curtailed, postponed or cancelled.

The Guardian: Speaking at the Euroscience Open Forum in Barcelona, Arnulf Jaeger-Waldau of the European commission's Institute for Energy, said that the Middle East could supply Europe's energy needs by building solar power farms that would the capture of just 0.3% of the light falling on the Sahara and Middle East deserts on roughly an area the size of Wales.

Scientists are calling for the creation of these series of huge solar farms as part of a plan to share Europe's renewable energy resources across the continent.

The vision for the renewable energy grid comes as the EU commission's joint research centre (JRC) published its strategic energy technology plan, highlighting solar PV as one of eight technologies that need to be championed for the short- to medium-term future.

The JRC plan includes fuel cells and hydrogen, clean coal, second generation biofuels, nuclear fusion, wind, nuclear fission and smart grids. The plan is designed to help Europe to meet its commitments to reduce overall energy consumption by 20% by 2020, while reducing CO² emissions by 20% in the same time and increasing to 20% the proportion of energy generated from renewable sources.

Wired.com: The Pentagon's storied research and development arm turned 50 years old this year, and its birthday present appears to be another $100 million in budget cuts, according to a Defense Department document. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is having a tumultuous financial year: in June, DARPA faced a $32 million cut because it was "underexecuting", leading the agency's director, Tony Tether, to strike back by saying the Pentagon's "comptroller apparently does not believe in accountability."

Cognitive computing systems, which has previously been hit by congressional cuts, will lose another $13 million, while Network Centric Technology is sliced by $19 million. Another $18 million is being diced from biological warfare defense, and a big cut is taken out of DARPA's Electronics Technology program, which loses $26 million. The cuts also indicate that DARPA's high power fiber laser program has apparently been canceled.

The Guardian: An internal audit undertaken by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (DBERR) of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) has found significant financial risk that were exacerbated by misunderstandings, unminuted meetings and lack of sufficiently trained staff which has led to embarrassing cost overruns that forced the department to find £400m worth of emergency funds from other budgets to balance the books.

Houston Chronicle: Two days after telling an online town hall meeting that NASA had "failed us miserably" and "wastes a vast amount of money," Houston Rep. John Culberson said Thursday he was weighing legislation to overhaul the structure of the space agency responsible for about 20,000 Houston-area jobs.

The Independent: Prime Minister Gordon Brown is to fast-track the building of at least eight nuclear power stations to cut Britain's dependence on oil following the dramatic rise in its price.

Brown is quoted in a speech at the "Union for the Mediterranean" summit in Paris as saying there will be "no upper limit" on the number of nuclear plants that will be built by private companies. This would mean, despite the decommissioning of nearly all the UK's current reactors over the next 15 years, that nuclear power, which currently provides about 20 per cent of Britain's electricity, could meet a bigger share. The location for the first batch of new nuclear power plants will be announced in 2010.

The speech outlined the UK's vision of a "post-oil economy", calling for "a renaissance of nuclear power" and "massive expansion" of renewable energy in which the North Sea becomes "a vital energy resource through harnessing wind power.

Related Physics Today article
A Stronger Future for Nuclear Power (February 2006)
Nuclear power's costs and perils (January 2007)
Nuclear power challenges and alternatives (September 2007)
DOE urged to proceed more deliberately with global plan to expand nuclear power (July 2008, restricted to subscribers)

Washington Post: The Bush administration has decided not to take any new steps to regulate greenhouse gas emissions before the president leaves office, despite pressure from the Supreme Court and broad accord among senior federal officials that new regulation is appropriate now.

The New York Times: Vice President Dick Cheney’s office was involved in removing statements on health risks posed by global warming from a draft of a health official’s Senate testimony last year, a former senior government environmental official said on Tuesday.

The Washington Post: The Bush administration moved to impose financial sanctions on Iranian officials and companies accused of helping develop nuclear weapons there.

ENN: The European Union and green groups piled pressure on the United States on Monday to agree to a target to halve global greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century and back the need for rich countries to set 2020 goals as well.

News.com: India released its first action plan for climate change earlier this week

The New York Times: With an infusion of money, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory will avoid layoffs of 80 employees and resume work on a project to investigate ephemeral particles known as neutrinos.

Globe and Mail: The space telescope will be no bigger than a hefty suitcase and weigh just 65 kilograms, but the Canadian scientists behind the project say when the device is launched two years from now, it may well go on to save the world.

The $12-million Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite, dubbed NEOSSat, is considered a world's first - designed specifically as an early warning system to pinpoint asteroids on a collision course with Earth. It will also detect space junk in the path of other orbiting satellites to prevent crashes that could shut down telecommunications - television, telephone, GPS and banking systems - around the globe.

ENN: The European Union reached a landmark agreement Thursday to cap emissions from aircraft, raising the stakes in an increasingly ferocious battle with the United States over how to regulate global greenhouse gases.

In the first requirement of its kind, all airlines arriving or leaving from airports located in the EU would be obliged to buy some pollution credits beginning in 2012, joining other industrial polluters that trade in the European emissions market. That includes non-European carriers like American Airlines and Singapore Airlines

The New York Times: The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

Financial Times: When candidates agree, it is not always front-page news. Election coverage hinges on conflict. Effective governance works differently. The next president must work to build consensus to get things done. Nuclear security is an excellent place to start; in fact, a remarkable bipartisan consensus is emerging that can help the 44th president revolutionise America’s policy towards nuclear weapons.

The Times: India and China are taking their rivalry into orbit, with Delhi determined to catch up with Beijing in what is starting to look like an Asian version of the Cold War “space sace”.

General Deepak Kapoor, India’s Chief of Army Staff, has spoken publicly for the first time of his fears about China’s military space programme and the need for India to accelerate its own.

“The Chinese space programme is expanding at an exponentially rapid pace in both offensive and defensive content,” he told a conference attended by India’s military top brass this week. “The Indian Army’s agenda for exploitation of space will have to evolve dynamically. It should be our endeavour to optimise space applications for military purposes.”

ScienceNow: A third of a loaf is better than nothing. That's the feeling among the U.S. research community after the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly yesterday to boost the current budgets of four key science agencies by $337 million. Although it was less than lobbyists had hoped, it's probably more likely to happen than the sizeable budget increases for next year approved this week by several House and Senate spending panels with jurisdiction over a number of science agencies. Lobbyists fear those numbers, for the 2009 budget year that begins in October, could represent high-water marks in a process that likely will extend far beyond the November elections.

The New York Times: Senator John McCain said Wednesday that he wanted 45 new nuclear reactors built in the United

The Associated Press: A Bush administration official was seeking to convince skeptical lawmakers Thursday that a U.S.-Russian agreement on civilian nuclear power would not undermine efforts to rein in Iran's nuclear program.

The New York Times: According to the Congressional Research Service, there are only about 30 scientists among the 535 senators and representatives in the 110th Congress, and that is counting the psychologist, the psychiatrist, a dozen other M.D.’s, three nurses, an engineer, two veterinarians, a pharmacist and an optometrist.

The Washington Post: Military power requires brainpower, and the Defense Department is moving to engage a new generation of scientists and engineers to conduct research that may pay off in technological breakthroughs for the nation's military.

Physics Today: The House committee on science and technology unanimously passed NASA's 2009 budget (H.R. 6063) which orders NASA to make one extra flight to the international space station to deliver the $1.5 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer.

AMS was without a launch vehicle after the loss of space shuttle columbia cancelled its 2009 flight. NASA had been looking at alternative launch vehicles but the large cost involved made approval unlikely (see NASA Cancels Science Flight, Ditches International Partners May 2007).

"NASA has a key role to play in the nation's innovation agenda, ensuring the future health of our nation's aviation system, and advancing our efforts to better understand our climate and the changes facing the Earth system," said Chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN). "In addition, a properly structured human space flight and exploration program can provide dividends technologically, scientifically, and geopolitically--and is worthy of the nation's investment in it."

H.R. 6063 adds more than $1.6 billion to the White House request. The bill emphasizes the importance of aeronautics R&D, strengthening the exploration program, and NASA leadership in Earth science research and applications. It increases funding for the climate-monitoring satellite Glory, the development of the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle and the Ares launcher, which is currently scheduled to enter service in 2015, nearly 5 years after the last shuttle flight.

ENN: Even before debate began on Monday on the first comprehensive climate change bill to reach the Senate floor, the White House said President George W. Bush would veto it in its current form.

Bush himself slammed the bill, saying it would cost the U.S. economy $6 trillion. His estimate drew quick denials from those who support the legislation, including Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat and longtime environmentalist.

[From ENN: Bush would veto U.S. climate change bill]

Physics Today: The Department of Energy announced today that the Princeton University-based National Compact Stellarator Experiment has been canceled. The news was delivered in person by Raymond Fonck, DOE associate director for fusion energy sciences.

"In late 2006, it became clear that the NCSX construction project would not be able to meet its approved baseline total project cost of $102M or its completion date of July 2009," said Undersecretary for Science Raymond Orbach in a statement. Since then the DOE, Princeton University, and thePrinceton Plasma Physics Laboratory have been reviewing options for the project and PPPL. They concluded that "the budget increases, schedule delays and continuing uncertainties of the NCSX construction project necessitate its closure," said Orbach. The new proposed cost for NCSX was $170 million and its new start date was August 2013, which would have put research at PPPL in peril, said an April 2008 Office of Science report.

"PPPL's future as a world-leading center of fusion energy and plasma sciences is more assured by a renewed focus on the successful Spherical Torus confinement concept," added Orbach. Under the existing construction proposal for NCSX, the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) would have had to close, which would have had implications for US involvement in the ITER fusion project.

"The Spherical Torus is closely related to the [ITER] tokamak, and experiments planned for the next several years in the NSTX facility promise many exciting discoveries that should directly impact our ability to understand the new plasma regimes expected in ITER," says Orbach. "Proposed upgrades for [NSTX] can keep this facility at the forefront of fusion science research... well into the future."