The Tech: Eight MIT graduate students with student visas were denied a key credential by the Department of Homeland Security. After their department appealed the decisions on their behalf, the DHS declared at least two of the students “security threats.” The troubles stem from a new homeland security program called the Transportation Worker Identification Credential, a plastic card which, like an MIT ID, contains personally identifying information and can be read wirelessly. Without the credential, the students will soon have a harder time boarding and leaving ships at U.S. ports, including the three research ships at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, where the students work. The situation was well-known to WHOI, but it only came to MIT’s attention yesterday, when a German student forwarded to colleagues in the Earth, Atmosphere, and Planetary Sciences Department a letter from the Department of Homeland Security. The letter said in part: “I have personally reviewed the Initial Determination of Threat Assessment, your reply, accompanying information, and all other information and materials available to the TSA. Based upon this review, I have determined that you pose a security threat and you do not meet the eligibility requirements to hold a Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC).” A British graduate student received a similar letter, said James A. Yoder, dean of WHOI.
London Review of Books: John Lanchester, a contributing editor at the London Review of Books reviews a series a books on global warming and ends his review with the following paragraphs:
The remarkable thing is that most of the things we need to do to prevent climate change are clear in their outline, even though one can argue over details. We need to insulate our houses, on a massive scale; find an effective form of taxing the output of carbon (rather than just giving tradeable credits to the largest polluters, which is what the EU did – a policy that amounted to a 30 billion euro grant to the continent’s biggest polluters); spend a fortune on both building and researching renewable energy and DC power; spend another fortune on nuclear power; double or treble our spending on public transport; do everything possible to curb the growth of air travel; and investigate what we need to do to defend ourselves if the sea rises, or if food imports collapse. If we do that we may find that we develop the technologies that China and India will need. If we can show that it is possible to cut carbon output dramatically without trashing our economy – well, that might be the single most important thing we could do, far outweighing the actual impact of our emission reductions.
We know all this, but whether any of it will actually happen is a different question. It is easy for politicians to stick wind turbines on their houses and ride bicycles, but effective action on climate change is about to require doing things that are not popular. In his eponymous report, Nicholas Stern has argued that it would cost about 1 per cent of global GDP now to prevent a loss of 5 per cent of global GDP in the future. The calculation is tweaked to make the cost now sound manageably small – but it is not yet clear whether Western electorates are willing to pay it. One per cent of global GDP is 600 billion dollars, most of which would be paid by the developed world. The idea is that by paying it now we would be keeping the world’s economy on track so that by 2050 the developed world would be 200 per cent richer and the developing world 400 per cent, while our emissions decline by 60 to 90 per cent and theirs increase by 25 to 50. (One problem is that 17 per cent of that growth in developing world emissions has already been used up.) The promised economic growth is jam tomorrow; we would be paying for it today, in the form of increased taxes and lost jobs. These things are all real to voters in ways that climate change perhaps is not. Are people going to give things up in the present in order to prevent things that computer models tell them are going to happen in 25 years’ time? If they – we – aren’t, then we’re heading for breeding pairs, and camels in the Arctic.
Washingtonpost.com: The Environmental Protection Agency yesterday proposed tightening the federal limits for lead in the air, but the proposal fell short of what its own scientists said is required to protect public health.
Chronicle.com: Advocates for scientists have lost their bid to persuade Congress to raise spending on physical-sciences research during the remainder of the 2008 fiscal year. The money is not contained in a war-spending bill that the U.S. House of Representatives is to consider on Thursday.
Physics Today: Faster moving ships hit the whales, causing injury or death, say scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Yet for over a year the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs has blocked the National Marine Fisheries Service from issuing a rule based on scientific research that limits the speed of ships near US ports to protect the endangered right whale.
 According to documents obtained by the House of representative committee on oversight and government reform (OGR), the delay appears to be based on objections raised by Whitehouse officials and the Vice President's office. Under Executive order 12866, the OIRA is supposed to complete their review of rule changes within 90 days and can only extend the review period by an additional 30 days.
According to Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA), who recently sent a letter to the administration requesting an explanation, the Vice President's office is objecting to NOAA's research as the Vice President's staff "contends that we have no evidence that lowering the speeds of 'large ships' will actually make a difference."
In a memo obtained by the OGR committee NOAA rejected these objections, stating that both a statistical analysis of ship strike records and the peer-reviewed literature justified the final rule. NOAA reported that there is "no basis to overturn our previous conclusion that imposing a speed limit on large vessels would be beneficial to whales."
Waxman says that he questions "why White House economic advisors are apparently conducting their own research on right whales and why the Vice President's staff is challenging the conclusions of the government's scientific experts. The appearance is that the White House rejects the conclusions of its own scientists and peer-reviewed scientific studies because it does not like the policy implications of the data. This is not how the review process is supposed to work."
msnbc.com: One of the nation's top fusion researchers is worried that America is already falling behind in an energy race that won't start for 30 or 40 years.
McGraw-Hill Construction: National laboratories are losing funds in real dollars and could face as much as a 20% drop in research activities because small, incremental budget increases in recent years have fallen short of inflation.
New Scientist: Damaging funding cuts to UK physics have left the UK looking like an "unreliable" and "incompetent" partner for international science, according to a damning report by politicians. Most of the blame for the fiasco is pinned on the head of the research council behind the cuts.
The UK Parliament's Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills committee examined the causes of the physics funding crisis which emerged in December 2007. The Science and Technology Facilities Council – the UK's main funding body for physics and astronomy, and which looks after some of the largest science centres in the country – was faced with a deficit of £80m after an unfavourable government spending review last year.
To plug the hole, the STFC withdrew from key international physics projects including the International Linear Collider, the Gemini Observatory and ground-based solar terrestrial physics. The sweeping cuts also left some university physics departments in fear of closure.
The move stunned physicists, who had received little warning that UK involvement in the projects was in jeopardy. They argued that the measures were taken with little warning or consultation. Today's 55-page report, based on evidence provided by STFC bosses, civil servants and physicists at three hearings earlier this year, comes to a similar conclusion.
The report condemns the decision-making process behind the cuts as "ineffective" and "secretive" and describes the STFC's peer-review system as "weak".
Updated: 1:24 PM EST
According to a report in The Register, Keith Mason, the head of the Science and Technology Facilities Council is now under pressure to resign over his handling of the budget cuts.
Science: Three cities vying to host a €1 billion neutron beam research center called the European Spallation Source (ESS) last week submitted bids to a specially created, independent panel of "wise people." "Rational criteria are better than the handshake of two powerful people," says Colin Carlile of Lund University in Sweden, director of the ESS-Scandinavia consortium.
Early in the decade the ESS project foundered and its central project office closed in 2003 due to a lack of political will to get the facility constructed. Meanwhile, the United States built the Spallation Neutron Source in Tennessee, and Japan built a source as part of its nearly complete J-PARC facility at Tokai.
ESS was given new impetus by the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI), a body tasked by the European Union with drawing up a list of planned large facilities that EU nations should work together on.
ESS was one of 35 projects in the first ESFRI road map released in 2006. Three cities were soon vying to host ESS--Lund in Sweden, Bilbao in Spain, and Debrecen in Hungary--and seeking allies. The Lund team is building an alliance of five Scandinavian nations, the three Baltic states, and Poland. Debrecen is working on its central European neighbors (including Poland) as well as Russia. And the Debrecen and Bilbao teams pledged to support each other should one of them have a face-off with Lund.
Chronicle of Higher Education: Two years ago, the National Academies sounded the alarm in a widely cited report, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” that America was slipping behind other countries in science and technology. On Tuesday leaders from academe and business met here to try to refocus Congress’s attention on the report’s many recommendations that require lawmakers’ action. One expected topic of discussion on Tuesday is a lobbying effort already under way to persuade Congress to increase federal spending for physical-sciences research significantly this year. The money could be squeezed into a broader supplemental-appropriations bill that legislators are expected to consider in the coming weeks to finance the Iraq war.
Die Spiegel: Nuclear power is too dangerous. Coal is too dirty. Gas involves too much dependence on Russia. And renewables are insufficient. So just where is Germany going to get its power from?
Nature: Science funding in the European Union needs to be revised to better serve economic, social and environmental goals, Luke Georghiou argues.
Japan Times: Full-fledged reinforcement of the international nuclear nonproliferation framework is of vital importance for facilitating peaceful use of nuclear power and thereby for addressing the pressing global challenges of energy supply and global warming, according to a private policy study group. To attain this goal, all nations, regardless of whether they have nuclear capability, must work on nonproliferation initiatives, such as stepped-up disarmament efforts and reinforcement of nuclear site inspections, according to the Study Group on Nuclear Nonproliferation. The proposal by the 12-member expert group, headed by Shunji Yanai, former ambassador to the U.S., was submitted to Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura last Wednesday
Science: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has substantially modified the way it updates a database on chemical hazards that influences how chemicals are regulated. The agency says the changes should make the process more transparent and more rigorous, and speedier. But critics argue that the new procedure is more secretive and gives too much clout to federal agencies that pollute or face massive cleanup costs. One result, they say, will be further delays in regulation.
Science: The international team of climate change scientists that produced an influential series of reports last year--and won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize--will be doing things a little differently in the future. Government delegates to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), meeting last week in Budapest, Hungary, approved a plan for the 20-year, 100-nation enterprise that would generate more precise and relevant information on climate change--without taking any longer than the current 6-year gap between reports. To do so, the delegates endorsed procedural changes that scientists had proposed to streamline the process.
Various: More than 900 scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) say they have personally experienced political interference in their work, according to a survey released today by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). The report has been picked up by ScienceNOW, Reuters, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post
"Our investigation found an agency in crisis," said Francesca Grifo, director of UCS's Scientific Integrity Program. "Distorting science to accommodate a narrow political agenda threatens our environment, our health, and our democracy itself."
The survey results show "an agency under siege from political pressures," says UCS while in a statement EPA says that the concerns may largely reflect a misunderstanding of how policy is made. EPA spokesman Jonathan Shradar said the findings will not change anything.
The survey was sent to the majority of 7000 scientists at EPA last summer, and 1586 filled it out.
Among the UCS report's findings:
– 889 scientists (60 percent) said they had personally experienced at least one instance of political interference in their work over the last five years.
– 394 scientists (31 percent) personally experienced frequent or occasional "statements by EPA officials that misrepresent scientists' findings."
– 285 scientists (22 percent) said they frequently or occasionally personally experienced "selective or incomplete use of data to justify a specific regulatory outcome."
– 224 scientists (17 percent) said they had been "directed to inappropriately exclude or alter technical information from an EPA scientific document."
– Of the 969 agency veterans with more than 10 years of EPA experience, 409 scientists (43 percent) said interference has occurred more often in the past five years than in the previous five-year period. Only 43 scientists (4 percent) said interference occurred less often.
– Hundreds of scientists reported being unable to openly express concerns about the EPA's work without fear of retaliation; 492 (31 percent) felt they could not speak candidly within the agency and 382 (24 percent) felt they could not do so outside the agency.
The UCS investigation also revealed that EPA scientists cannot freely communicate their findings to the media, public or colleagues. Seven-hundred-eighty-three respondents (51 percent) said EPA policies do not let scientists speak freely to the news media about their findings. Scientists also shared anecdotes about being barred from presenting their research at conferences and their difficulties clearing research publication articles with EPA managers.
Scientists who reported political interference tended to work in offices that write regulations rather than in basic research labs. Hundreds said they feared retaliation by officials if they voiced concerns about EPA regulations.
In optional essays, scientists repeatedly singled out the Office of Management and Budget at the White House, accusing officials there of inserting themselves into decision-making at early stages in a way that shaped the outcome of their inquiries. They also alleged that the OMB delayed rules not to its liking. EPA actions "are held hostage" until changes are made, a scientist from the EPA's Office of Air and Radiation wrote.
BBC NEWS: The US space agency (Nasa) has extended the international Cassini-Huygens mission by two years. The unmanned Cassini-Huygens spacecraft entered orbit around Saturn in 2004 on a mission that was supposed to come to an end in July this year. The two-year mission extension will encompass some 60 extra orbits of Saturn and more flybys of its moons.
Washington Post: Concerned that not enough attention is being paid to the risk of a nuclear attack, a Senate committee yesterday looked at the consequences of such a terrorist strike in Washington -- and said that more could be done to save lives. A hearing, called by the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, featured charts showing the horrific effects of a small nuclear device detonating near the White House. It was the panel's third session in recent months on the threat of a nuclear explosion.
The Guardian: Sir Nicholas Stern has warned that the gloomy predictions of his high-profile review of the future effects of global warming underestimated the risks, and that climate change poses a bigger threat than he realised. Stern said this week that new scientific findings showed greenhouse gas emissions were causing more damage than was understood in 2006, when he prepared his study for the government. He pointed to last year's reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and new research which shows that the planet's oceans and forests are soaking up less carbon dioxide than expected.
Stern said the new findings vindicated his report, which has been criticised by climate sceptics and some economists as exaggerating the possible damage. "People who said I was scaremongering were profoundly wrong," he told a conference in London.
The Daily Californian: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will lay off 535 employees beginning as early as mid-May, officials announced Tuesday. The lab will release full-time employees who largely work in administration, in addition to scientists and engineers, said lab spokesperson Lynda Seaver. The last time it let go of permanent workers was 35 years ago. "We're doing everything to make sure we still meet our mission, but obviously this does have an effect," Seaver said. "There are a lot of good people we're going to have to release."
Los Angeles Times: A successful Chinese missile test last year that destroyed one of China's own aging satellites has substantially added to space debris around Earth, increasing the danger that a chain reaction of colliding space junk could threaten parts of the world's satellite network, scientists said Tuesday.
The threat is that debris could begin slamming into other debris, creating a cascading effect called supercriticality, according to scientists addressing the American Physical Society conference here this week.
"Debris in space is already a problem," said David Wright, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Mass. "But it's potentially a very big problem."
>Geoffrey Forden, an MIT physicist and expert on the Chinese space program, said the danger from space debris was actually more of a worry than the threat that the Chinese, or some other country, could intentionally cripple American space assets with antisatellite weapons.
According to Wright, the Chinese shoot-down on Jan. 11, 2007, added more than 2 million pieces of debris in low-Earth orbit, where most satellites are located.
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North Canada, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans likely path of spy satellite debris
Washington Post: The directors of the nation's three national nuclear weapons laboratories say that budget cuts by Congress and the Bush administration have reduced their ability to carry out scientific research needed to ensure the reliability of the nation's nuclear arsenal in future years.
ENN: The world needs tougher action to combat global warming than a plan by President George W. Bush to halt a rise in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions only by 2025, delegates at a climate conference in Paris said on Thursday. South Africa, one of 17 nations at the two-day global warming talks that started on Thursday, called Bush's proposals "disappointing" and unambitious when many other industrialized economies are already cutting emissions.
BBC Newsnight: Nicholas Owen, from the solar theory group at St Andrews University got loud applause when he asked a panel on the crisis in UK science funding at the annual meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society: "I'm a PhD student in solar physics. Why, in the current climate, should I and other students take the risk of continuing to do research in this area?"
The answer he got, from John Womersley, director of science programmes at the Science and Technology Facilities Council, was criticised as patronising: "If you cared about money you wouldn't be a scientist at all would you," he told the students in the hall.
"You may feel it's a bigger gamble than you want to make, knowing what you do about future funding."
"But if it's not rewarding, and it's not exciting and you don't feel you can make a contribution, then don't do it. If you can, then let's figure out a way that you can. The future budgets make it tough, I can't deny that."
Susan Watts investigates why UK scientists are so upset with the labour government over science funding.
space.com:
NASA and Europe's space agency weigh plans for a Jupiter or Saturn mission.
ScienceNOW: A plan to hold a presidential debate on science and technology issues in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, next week has failed. Now organizers hope to stage the event on 9 May in Oregon. But with candidates careful to avoid missteps, that plan faces tough odds.
Science: The U.S. military has more to gain than lose by working with Chinese scientists on fundamental research. So says the Pentagon's former director of basic research, William Berry, in arguing for the removal of obstacles to scientific cooperation between the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and China despite the military rivalry between the two countries.
Berry, now a researcher at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., writes with colleague Cheryl Loeb in a working paper published by his center last week that collaborating with Chinese researchers at a time of rapid growth in China's science and technology investment will help DOD stay on the cutting edge of materials, biotechnology, energy sciences, and other disciplines relevant to long-term U.S. security interests.* It would also help the U.S. military learn more about China's scientific capabilities, says Berry, who was wowed by a visit to Shanghai's Fudan University last fall. As first steps toward fostering these links, the authors want DOD to encourage its program managers and scientists to travel to Chinese universities, establish a liaison office in China, and sponsor visits by Chinese academics to U.S. institutions.
Reuters: An ambitious vision to take people to the moon and Mars may fall apart before it even gets off the ground because of uncertain planning and inadequate funding, several experts said on Thursday.
A congressional report said NASA's replacement for the space shuttle, the Constellation Program, is in jeopardy, and members of Congress as well as at least one former astronaut agreed at a hearing on the issue.
BBC: Astronomers must make the best case for their subject to government if they are to stave off further funding woes says Keith Mason, head of the funding body for UK astronomy, when he addressed a scientific meeting in Belfast.
Administrators have cut projects and research grants as they attempt to plug an £80m hole in their finances.
But there may be some good news for one project called eMerlin, a network of seven giant astronomy dishes. The president of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), Michael Rowan-Robinson, told the audience in Belfast he understood the project was now no longer threatened.
Sacramento Bee: Attorney General Jerry Brown joined officials in 17 other states Wednesday to demand that the federal Environmental Protection Agency release its internal finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health.
The move comes after EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson wrote last week that he plans to open a months-long public comment period on greenhouse gas emissions, a procedure critics say serves to delay action on emissions until after President Bush leaves office.
The states, joined by environmental groups, filed their legal demand Wednesday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, asking that EPA release the finding within 60 days.
NPR: Projections for the evolution of green technologies to help curb greenhouse gas emissions are overly optimist, according to researchers writing in Nature. They say policymakers will need to implement stronger measures to reverse global warming.
SciAm.com: Radiation monitors at U.S. ports cannot reliably detect highly enriched uranium, which onshore terrorists could assemble into a nuclear bomb says Thomas B. Cochran and Matthew G. McKinzie
Space News: Ed Weiler, the salty, straight-talking astrophysicist who left NASA headquarters in 2004 to take the helm of the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center, is returning to Washington to replace NASA science chief Alan Stern, an equally straight-talking scientist who abruptly resigned March 25 after less than a year on the job.
Weiler talked to Space News staff writer Brian Berger about the leadership transition ahead for NASA's Science Mission Directorate (SMD).
NPR: Along Florida's "Space Coast," people are worrying about what the end of the shuttle program will mean for workers and the region's economy.
For many who live and work here, the looming end of the space shuttle brings back memories of the 1970s. Within just a few years of men landing on the Moon, the workforce at the Kennedy Space Center was cut from 25,000 employees to less than half that.
The ripple effects from those layoffs, Koller recalls, devastated Florida communities from Titusville to Melbourne.
The replacement for the space shuttle, Constellation, and the other future NASA programs at Cape Canaveral will require far fewer people than those needed for the space shuttle.
Lynda Weatherman, of the area's economic development commission, says it's important that Florida's Space Coast diversify its aerospace industry and the role it plays in the nation's space program.
"We don't want to rely on launch. We can't afford to rely on launch," she says.
CNN: NASA officials have directed the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) program to cut $4 million dollars from its $approximately 20 million dollar budget this year, and principal investigator Steve Squyres tells CNN that will likely mean science operations will have to be suspended for Spirit. The rover would be put in hibernation mode, and if all goes well it could be reactivated in the future in the event funding is restored.
Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell
NASA Headquarters spokesman Dwayne Brown confirmed the budget directive has been issued. He said the reason behind the cut is to offset cost overruns with the Mars Science Laboratory, a follow-on rover set to launch next year.
Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required): Two-thirds of academic earmarks ($1.6-billion) was directed to scientific research at almost 500 institutions says a new report from the Chronicle of Higher Education. For 2008, the median earmark was $462,000, down from $497,000 in 2003.
Since 2003, it has been harder to win peer-reviewed federal research grants as the budget of the NIH and NSF declined in real terms. In 2008 each agency expects to approve about one in five grant applications, down from one in three in 2001. The drop has made earmarks more attractive to institutions says Chronicle reporters Jeffrey Brainard and JJ Hermes, who report on a 25-percent increase in the number of colleges and universities receiving earmarks compared to the last time the newspaper ran a similar survey in 2003.
The numbers and names show "a system that's out of control," says Michael S. Lubell, director of public affairs at the American Physical Society.
Space Review: Two letters in Space Review debate whether the risks associated with the hydrazine fuel tank were fully understood by the public and the US Defense Department (DoD) before the US Navy shot down a disabled US spy satellite (see Broken spy satellite hit by US missile). The US was concerned that the fuel tank might survive reentry into the atmosphere and contaminate a wide area with the toxic hydrazine fuel.
 Andrew Higgins of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, suggests that critics of the decision to shoot down the satellite, have not fully grasped hydrazine's burn rate at the pressure contained in the tank or calculated the tank's reentry survivability.
In independent computer simulations of the reentry of the USA 193 satellite, Geoff Forden of MIT and Higgins, found that the maximum deceleration of the tank would have been about 8 to 10 g’s. "This is similar to the g-loading the fully fueled tank is designed to withstand upon launch," says Higgins. "Thus, it is unlikely that a similar loading would have destroyed the tank on reentry."
Yousaf Butt of the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University points out that questions should be raised about the overall quality of the DoD's reentry simulation models, because the DoD did not predict the hydrazine explosion that occurred during the interception.
"It would serve NASA/NRO/DoD well to immediately publicize the unclassified portions of their studies so that the US public can ascertain whether the putative public health concern of the hydrazine surviving reentry was indeed well-founded," says Butt. "As technical details of hydrazine tanks are freely available online, it is difficult to comprehend what is so classified about these studies."
Related links
Broken spy satellite hit by US missile (Physics Today Online)
North Canada, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans likely path of spy satellite debris (Physics Today Online)
More doubts surface over Pentagon’s explanation for shooting down spy satellite (Physics Today Online)
Nature: UK physicists, received more bad news this week when the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) announced a 15% cut worth $260 million (£130 million) money awarded as research grants.
"It is unclear what the impact will be on EPSRC's future ability to fund computing research," says Steve Furber of the British Computer Society. "The government seems to be signalling to potential science applicants that computing research is not accorded a high priority."
The EPSRC scale-back is expected to lead to job losses,and comes after the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council announced funding cuts of around £80 million and a 25% reduction in grant money.
Related Links
UK science research council under fire over cuts
UK Physicists go online to protest funding cuts
No cash rescue for UK physics funding crisis
UK physics has bright future says science chief; physicists disagree
UK physics funding under review, but outcome looks unhopeful
UK reviews physics funding in light of proposed job cuts
New York Times: Utility executives in Kansas were shocked last fall when a state environmental official rejected two coal-fired power plants because of the millions of tons of carbon-dioxide emissions they could produce. In a state where coal generates 73 percent of the electricity, the pro-coal forces were unable to work their will.
That ineffectiveness will be underscored as early as Friday if Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, as expected, vetoes an effort by the Kansas State Legislature to ensure the plants are approved. A handful of lawmakers seeking a new energy policy are blocking the attempt to override.
The struggle over those plants is an example of a growing trend in climate-change politics. In the absence of clear federal mandates for emissions from smokestack industries, states that have been proving grounds for new environmental approaches to energy are becoming battlegrounds as well
Wired: Trying to pin down how much the Defense Department is spending on space combat research -- and on what projects -- is difficult. The programs are spread across at least a dozen different accounts; much of the technology involved is "dual use" -- meaning, it could help with another military matters, too; and that's before you get into the Defense Department's "black," classified budget.
According to the Center for Defense Information, the Pentagon will spend at minimum $520 million in the 2009 budget on research that could lead to arms in space.
Washington Post: A plan by the Environmental Protection Agency to close several of its 26 research libraries did not fully account for the impact on government staffers and the public, who rely on the libraries for hard-to-find environmental data, congressional investigators reported yesterday.
The report by the Government Accountability Office found that the EPA effort, begun in 2006 to comply with a $2 million funding cut sought by the White House, may have hurt access to materials and services in the 37-year-old library network.
Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.), chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, said the report reveals a "grim picture" of mismanagement at the EPA.
USA Today: President Bush has failed to back up his broad vision to revive the nation's interest in space exploration with adequate funding or even public support, a leading scientist told lawmakers.
"The money that was promised to execute the mission has not been provided, and it's hard to say that the vision has generated much excitement, particularly among the young, who are expected to benefit the most," said Lennard Fisk, chairman of the National Research Council Space Studies Board.
Washington Post: The Environmental Protection Agency weakened one part of its new limits on smog-forming ozone after an unusual last-minute intervention by President Bush, according to documents released by the EPA.
EPA officials initially tried to set a lower seasonal limit on ozone to protect wildlife, parks and farmland, as required under the law. While their proposal was less restrictive than what the EPA's scientific advisers had proposed, Bush overruled EPA officials and on Tuesday ordered the agency to increase the limit, according to the documents.
"It is unprecedented and an unlawful act of political interference for the president personally to override a decision that the Clean Air Act leaves exclusively to EPA's expert scientific judgment," said John Walke, clean-air director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The president's order prompted a scramble by administration officials to rewrite the regulations to avoid a conflict with past EPA statements on the harm caused by ozone.
According to the Washington Post, Solicitor General Paul D. Clement warned administration officials late Tuesday night that the rules contradicted the EPA's past submissions to the Supreme Court, according to sources familiar with the conversation. As a consequence, administration lawyers hustled to craft new legal justifications for the weakened standard. On Friday, EPA Press Secretary, Jonathan Shradar said in a statement "EPA is unaware of either Paul Clement or anyone else in the Solicitor General's office ever stating or advising that "the rules contradicted the EPA's past submissions to the Supreme Court" as the Washington Post article today asserts."
Also on Friday US Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) called on EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson to explain why he overruled the recommendation of scientific advisors, and decided to issue a weaker standard for air pollution. Feinstein chairs the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on the Interior, Environment and Related Agencies. Feinstein also asked Johnson to address the White House's role in the matter, given the reports which suggest that it may have influenced a key part of his decision regarding ozone standards.
An unsigned editorial in the New York Times calls the move "permanently devalue the role of science while strengthening the hand of industry."
Related links
Press release from the EPA
Press Release from NRDC
Ozone rules weakened at Bush's Behest (Washington Post)
Statement by the U.S. EPA Press Secretary, Jonathan Shradar disavowing that Clement had provided advice
Press Release from Senator Feinstein
Reuters: China will tolerate experiment failures by its scientists to ease pressure, encourage innovation and cut the chances of fraud, a top official said on Thursday.
Worried about being left behind in global technological advances, China has launched a campaign to pour more resources into scientific research to boost "home-grown innovation".
Several high-profile cases of cheating in state-paid research programs have shocked the country in recent years, tarnishing the image of a sector already plagued by scandals of plagiarism and corruption.
Minister of Science and Technology Wan Gang blamed the fraud cases partly on mounting pressure to succeed in a "high-risk" area that cannot guarantee 100 percent positive results.
The Times of India: As many as 12% scientists and 38% doctors in the US are Indians, and in NASA, 36% or almost 4 out of 10 scientists are Indians says India's science minister D Purandeshwari. The minister was defending the country's higher education system and the state of research to the Indian parlament. Purandeshwari said that although a lot needed to be done to encourage research, it was wrong to run down the country's higher education system since most Indians who excelled abroad were products of Indian institutions.
The minister also listed initiatives taken to encourage research, especially in science. Apart from creating 1,000 positions of research scientists at various levels, she mentioned preparations to create 10 networking centres in basic sciences in leading departments of universities. These new centers would help in promoting collaborative research and give access to advanced facilities.
Related links
India rolls out nanotech initiative (12/7/2007)
Physics Today: Millionaire physicist Bill Foster may be the only democrat candidate running for Congressional office that has had an entire section of his campaign web site devoted to the particle accelerators and superconducting magnets. More remarkably, he just won a closely fought election by 53% to 47% in what is a republican stronghold.
 Foster defeated businessman and dairy magnate Jim Oberweis in a special election in Illinois to replace Republican representative Dennis Hastert, former Speaker of the House, who announced his retirement on November 26, 2007. Foster's campaign was supported by Illinois Senator Barak Obama, an endorsement that helped boost democratic turnout for the special election.
“Back in the laboratory, this is what we’d say was a pretty successful experiment,” said Foster, in a victory speech at a banquet hall in Aurora. “You sent a clear message to everyone in Washington. You demanded change, and you are demanding it now.”
Foster, who founded a successful national theater lighting company and has a 22-year career at Fermilab as a high energy physicist, worked on the collider detector that discovered the top quark and is the co-inventor of Fermilab’s antiproton recycler ring. Fermilab is near the heart of his congressional district, and has had to lay off 10% of its staff due to the decimation of the high energy physics budget for 2008.
Foster won’t have much time to become established in Washington political circles as the seat is up for grabs in November. He is sworn in on Thursday, when official certification of the election results are sent to Congress.
Related links
Fermilab rescue too late (2/7/2008)
Fermilab to Begin Furloughs on Friday (1/26/2008)
Federal cuts may doom Fermilab's bid for ILC (1/24/2008)
Budget blow to US science (12/28/2007)
Fermilab to cut 200 jobs, staff forced to take unpaid days off (12/21/2007)
Science: After a decade of making their case to the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), scientists planning a major project for remote monitoring of the oceans thought they had cleared the final hurdle in December. That's when an external panel blessed the $331 million venture, called the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), and told NSF officials "to enter into the detailed design and construction phase" to build it. "We were ready to go, and the reviewers agreed," says Steven Bohlen of the Consortium for Ocean Leadership in Washington, D.C., which is managing the project.
So Bohlen and his colleagues were shocked last month when NSF omitted building funds for OOI and two other long-running projects on the verge of construction--the $100 million National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) and the $123 million Alaska Region Research Vessel (ARRV)--from its 2009 budget request to Congress. It's part of a new policy aimed at eliminating cost overruns that occur after construction is under way. Those overruns have not only forced NSF to borrow from other accounts, but they can also lead to last-minute changes that weaken a project's scientific capabilities. Under the previous policy, a project was approved based chiefly on its scientific merit; it might be years before NSF arrived at a final price based on all relevant factors. Now, NSF is requiring a firm cost estimate before asking Congress for construction funds
Science: NASA says it is willing to fly a $1.5 billion experiment designed to detect antimatter. But Congress would have to come up with as much as $4 billion to make it happen, the agency says. Supporters of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) dispute those cost estimates but face an uphill struggle to get the 7000-kg probe into orbit.
In a 17-page report to Congress that was released two weeks ago, NASA paints a sobering picture of what it would take to attach the instrument to the international space station. Samuel Ting, the physics Nobelist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who has championed the project, says the 16-nation AMS collaboration has no money to buy another ride into space.
Related Physics Today article
NASA cancels science flight, ditches international partners (May 2007, page 30)
Science Progress: Dr. Raymond Orbach, Undersecretary for Science at the DOE and C.H. Albright Jr., Undersecretary of Energy at the DOE snubbed the House Committee on Science and Technology’s Subcommittee on Energy and Environment hearing at the last moment on Wednesday, suggesting that the subcommittee unfairly changed its protocol to allow outside experts at the budget hearing, a policy not approved by the DOE.
The Guardian: The UK's world-class network of radio telescopes run by the Jodrell Bank observatory is facing closure as last minute efforts failed to find the £40m needed to run it. Its future was thrown into doubt earlier this week when the UK's main physics funding body announced it may have to cut funding for the telescopes to help plug an £80m hole in its budget.
Work at Jodrell Bank, based at the University of Manchester, has put the UK at number two in the world for the study of stars and planets.
see also For 50 years, it has watched the stars. Now, to plug a black hole in the budget, Jodrell Bank may close (the Independent)
Newsweek: Although energy is proving to be an important topic in the US presidential elections, it may be a "vain hope" for a new administration to implement a unified energy policy writes David Victor in Newsweek. Previous experience shows that the coalition of groups urging for a change, national security analysts, environmentalists, and labor groups, is too diverse to sustain a concentrated two-decade program of change across all the government departments that impact energy policy says Victor. Both Europe and Asisa suffer from similar structural problems he adds, but the effort to combat global warming might change this pessimistic iron rule of energy policy as the environmental community that is the core of the coalition in support of global warming policy is becoming much stronger and has shown some staying power. Says Victor, "For the moment, however, that is a hypothesis to be proved."
Science: When NASA science chief Alan Stern last month announced that the space agency is backing a mission to collect rocks and soil from Mars and bring them back to Earth, many planetary researchers reacted with dismay rather than joy after looking at NASA's 2009 budget. According to budget documents released last month projected spending on Mars would be cut by half over the next 5 years. As a result, many scientists fear that NASA is abandoning a carefully plotted and extraordinarily successful research endeavor on the Red Planet in exchange for promises of an expensive mission far in the future.
Associated Press: The US Navy must abide by limits on its sonar training off the Southern California because the exercises could harm dozens of species of whales and dolphins, a federal appeals court ruled. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday night rejected the Navy's appeal of restrictions that banned high-powered sonar within 12 nautical miles of the coast and set other limits that could affect Navy training exercises to begin this month.
Related Article
Legal battle over sonar testing heats up (Physics Today February 2008)
Washington Post: Nearly two years ago, President Bush decided to open a new era of civilian nuclear cooperation with Russia. The two governments negotiated an agreement and initialed it last summer. A senior Russian official came here last month for what some thought would be a signing ceremony, only to have the administration pull back. Now the nuclear pact, once a symbol of closer U.S.-Russia ties, has stalled amid a quiet struggle in Washington over whether to trust Moscow.
USA Today: Amid an election year that will put new leaders into the White House, many are questioning the direction of the nation's space program.
Science: Last week, both Democratic and Republican members of the House Committee on Science and Technology complained in one voice that President George W. Bush has fallen short on his promise to bolster U.S. innovation in his 2009 budget request.
Various: The US has successfully hit USA 193, a 3-ton out-of-control spy satellite that failed 1.5 days after its launch in December 2006. Earlier this week the US announced plans to destroy the satellite because of the risk to humans over the toxic fuel the satellite was carrying. In a press conference held after the collision, General James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that he was very confident that they had hit the satellite and that the hydrazine fuel tank was destroyed. "Thus far we've seen nothing larger than a football among the debris," he said. At least 552 pieces of the satellite have been spotted by amateur satellite watchers.
 The decision to destroy the satellite has caused controversy within the public arms control community and by the Russian and Chinese governments, because of the low-risk associated with the public coming into contact with parts of the satellite. China is calling on the US to release more information about debris from the strike, and Russian diplomats are calling the inciden
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