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New Scientist: Jalila Essaïdi, a "bioartist" in the Netherlands, recently worked with an international team to blend spider silk with human skin to try to produce a bulletproof material. The project, called 2.6g 329m/s, involved a Utah State University team, which genetically engineered goats to produce spider-silk proteins in their milk. Researchers in South Korea and Germany spun the proteins and wove them into a fabric, which was then wedged between bioengineered skin cells by a biochemist at Leiden University in the Netherlands. In making the material, Essaïdi, who uses biology and life sciences as an artistic medium, says she wanted "to explore the social, political, ethical and cultural issues surrounding safety in a world with access to new biotechnologies." According to the artist, safety is a relative concept, as demonstrated by the "bulletproof" shield she constructed from the hybrid material, which succeeded in stopping a partially slowed bullet, but not one traveling at full speed.

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

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

Ars Technica: New technologies are enabling crowdsourcing in a number of scientific disciplines—most recently, seismology. After the 23 August 2011 earthquake on the US East Coast, a video rendering of the seismic waves’ travel was created by plotting the posted Twitter messages that contained the word “earthquake.” Richard Allen, a seismologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has published a paper in Science that discusses the possibilities and the limitations of such crowdsourcing of earthquake information. Besides Twitter, the US Geological Survey seeks the public’s input via its Did You Feel It? website, UC Berkeley has developed an iShake app that makes use of cell phones’ internal accelerometers, and Caltech offers to place seismometers in participants’ homes through its Community Seismic Network project. Crowdsourcing earthquake information is not a new idea: Seismologists have long used first-person reports, particularly for historic quakes that lack high-quality seismographic measurements, writes Scott Johnson for Ars Technica.

Telegraph: Two British amateur astronomers, Chris Holmes and Lee Threapleton, may have discovered a new planet. Inspired by Brian Cox’s Stargazing Live TV series, they studied time-lapse images of stars posted online at Planethunters.org. The site, which is part of the Zooniverse citizen science project, encourages users to identify extrasolar planets from data recorded by the Kepler space telescope. Holmes and Threapleton looked for anomalies in light patterns and found that a planet appeared to be orbiting a sun called SPH10066540, which lies 600–3000 light-years away. Thought to be gaseous and about the size of Neptune, the new planet will be named Threapleton Holmes B, provided the discovery is authenticated.

Nature: As traditional funding sources, such as universities and research funding agencies, face budget cuts, some scientists are turning to “crowd funding,” raising money for research directly from the public. A number of websites, such as Kickstarter and FundaGeek, have already launched. The basic procedure is that researchers submit their project idea and its estimated cost. If accepted, the proposal is placed online and donors have a set amount of time to make a donation. Some sites provide services free of charge, while others take a cut of the money raised. Although questions have come up concerning the lack of a formal review process and the fact that some projects will be more popular than others and will therefore attract more funding, many scientists have said they welcome the opportunity to experiment.

New York Times: A number of science-based events have been popping up throughout New York City—some serious, others not, writes Jennifer Schuessler for the New York Times. Offered at such eclectic venues as bars, art galleries, and funeral parlors, the talks feature both credentialed scientists and rank amateurs. All include entertainment along with edification. At the Bell House, a music and events venue, the Secret Science Club holds its monthly meetings, which have included such noted scientists as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium. Other series, such as Nerd Nite at the Galapagos Art Space, celebrate the expertise of amateurs, who rely on tongue-in-cheek PowerPoint slides, faux data, and lots of audience participation. Moonlighter Presents, on the other hand, draws academics, artists, and writers to speak on subjects outside their expertise. Topics have included the poetics of hay fever, the cultural politics of Steely Dan fandom, and the history of the car ferry in Elberta, Michigan.

BBC: Two physicists, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, have received knighthoods in the UK. The pair won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for their pioneering research on graphene. Knighthoods are a means of rewarding individuals’ personal achievements and service to the UK. This year, recipients from technology and science sectors make up 3% of the list. Other scientists honored with knighthoods include Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009 for his work on the ribosome, and Robert Watson, chief scientific adviser to the UK’s Department of Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs.

Science: Two researchers have conducted a new study in which they debunk several commonly held myths about gender and math performance. Among the myths they address is the speculation put forth by Lawrence Summers when he was president of Harvard University that males may have greater variability in intellectual mathematical abilities than females. Janet Mertz of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Jonathan Kane of the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater analyzed internationally standardized math test scores from 86 countries. They concluded that cultural factors are most likely causing the discrepancy in gender performance, and that increasing the number of female role models benefits everybody. "Scientific and mathematical progress relies on the best people doing their best work," said Rebecca Goldin of George Mason University. "If you discourage half the population [from doing math and science], then that part is simply not in your pool of who's the best, so the best science doesn't happen." In the US, parity has been reached at the high school and undergraduate levels, but a huge gap persists at the graduate level.

Science: Seven scientists and technicians are on trial in Italy for allegedly failing to properly assess seismic risks before the April 2009 earthquake that devastated the central Italian town of L'Aquila. One of the witnesses called this week is Christian Del Pinto, an Italian geophysicist who attended a meeting held by those experts the week before the deadly quake. He testified to having doubts about the scientific basis of some of the statements made during that meeting. Although the prosecution isn't contending that the experts should have been able to predict the location or severity of a quake, it does argue that the experts’ risk evaluation was "generic and ineffective." Del Pinto took issue with the experts' assertion that there is little chance of a sudden increase in the magnitude of tremors within a swarm. On 30 March such an increase did occur, according to Del Pinto, and therefore it was wrong to rule out further sudden increases in magnitude. He also stated that he was troubled by the experts' description of the swarm of tremors as an unremarkable phenomenon. The trial will resume on 12 January 2012.

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

Boston Globe: A Boston University physicist, H. Eugene Stanley, has spent the past 20 years in a field he calls "econophysics": using physics tools to analyze the economy. In a paper published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he and his colleagues address the problem of credit ratings and propose a better model for predicting fluctuations, writes Carolyn Johnson for the Boston Globe. “Many economists will tell you that the chances of something really big and bad happening are really, really small,” said Stanley in Science News. He contends, though, that catastrophic events—such as Lehman Brothers filing for bankruptcy in 2008—aren’t exceptional but inevitable. Stanley is working to produce a mathematical law to better calculate overall risk so that investors and regulators can prepare for those rare devastating events that can leave the entire economic system vulnerable.

Science: A new program will fund revolutionary science by do-it-yourself scientists and those with startup companies that aren't far enough along to attract venture capital, writes Jocelyn Kaiser for Science. Peter Thiel, a cofounder of PayPal and investor in Facebook, originated the concept for Breakout Labs, which is offering grants to independent researchers working on radical ideas. The foundation hopes to make 10 to 20 awards in the first year, ranging from $50 000 to $350 000, and scientists in any discipline can apply. In return, the grantees must publish in open-access journals and help support more projects, either by sharing a portion of future royalties with Breakout Labs or by assigning intellectual property to the program. How long Breakout Labs will run depends on the quality of the proposals it attracts, said program founder and executive director Lindy Fishburne.

Shareable: Here is a novel use for three-dimensional printers: producing shells for hermit crabs. Because they don’t make their own shells (they scavenge shells made by other creatures) and because the worldwide shell supply is diminishing, the crabs have been forced to use other objects instead, such as bottles and shotgun shell casings. Makerbot Industries, which produces build-it-yourself 3D printer kits, has launched Project Shellter to inspire members of the Makerbot community to design and produce the ideal hermit crab home. As inspired and inspiring as the project sounds, however, critics point out that a better solution would be for humans to stop destroying seashells in the first place. They also warn that the world’s oceans already contain too much plastic.

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

Nature: The US National Solar Observatory (NSO) is working with an officially appointed arbiter to resolve challenges to building the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST) on the summit of Haleakala, the highest mountain on the Hawaiian island of Maui. The ATST would have twice the aperture of existing solar telescopes and an improved resolution that would allow observation of solar features heretofore not directly observable, such as magnetic flux tubes, the precursors to sunspots. The coronal loops and flares that can cause geomagnetic storms arise from sunspots; such storms can disrupt communication networks, spacecraft, and the power grid. One argument in favor of the observatory is that the ATST meets a societal need. But there are potential negative consequences of building on Haleakala. The Hawaiian petrel, an endangered seabird, nests near the proposed site, and some native Hawaiians believe that the telescope's stark white enclosure will scar a sacred area. The builders of the NSO have said they will do all they can to minimize the impact of construction on the site.

BBC: Michael Blastland writes in BBC’s Go Figure column about a whimsical unit of radiation exposure: the BED, or banana equivalent dose. Originating sometime in the mid 1990s, the BED is defined as the radiation dose a person would absorb by eating one banana. Bananas, like most organic material, contain a certain amount of radioactive isotopes. Blastland contends that converting radiation exposure to bananas, instead of the current SI unit of sieverts, is a useful exercise for several reasons. He feels that measuring in bananas conveys to the lay person the ordinariness of radiation and that it brings home the point that it isn’t radiation itself that’s the problem but how much one is exposed to at a time. He writes, “By talking bananas, Go Figure doesn't mean to trivialize the health risk of radiation…. But the way we measure things can change how we think about them.”

Nature: Adlène Hicheur, a French Algerian physicist working at CERN, was arrested in his hometown of Vienne, France, in October 2009 on suspicion of plotting attacks against French military targets and an oil refinery owned by the French firm Total. He's spent the past two years in detention without trial or formal indictment. Swiss authorities closed their own investigation in the fall of 2010, stating that they found no evidence of wrongdoing, but French investigators extended the detention at that time. On 12 October the independent judicial investigation into the case will close, and prosecutors have one month after that to decide whether to try him or dismiss the charges.

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

Nature: Icelandic singer Björk's album Biophilia, which is released in two weeks, features songs about DNA, crystals, viruses, and electricity—each accompanied by an iPad app. Björk tells Nature's Andrew Mitchinson that the lessons are designed for children: "I felt that the years between five and eight, when a child's brain is soaking up languages and learning to read and write, are the perfect time to absorb musical theory." As part of her musical science tour, she'll be holding workshops at science museums around the globe, including in San Francisco.

Nature: Texas remains determined to phase out "low-performing" physics programs at state-funded universities if they fail to graduate at least 25 students every five years. This could affect nearly half of the 24 undergraduate physics programs in the state. The plans are consistent with the business-based approach advocated by Texas governor Rick Perry; they are also being considered by Florida governor Rick Scott as a way to reduce higher-education budgets in his state. While other undergraduate programs in Texas will be subject to the same metrics, physics programs are more at risk because they tend to enroll fewer students to begin with. Many smaller programs that don't meet the metric are in areas with predominantly African American, Hispanic, or other disadvantaged populations. Cutting programs in those areas could deny minority students access to science-related education. About 35% of undergraduate degrees in physics awarded in the US go to students in programs that don't meet the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board requirements.

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

MSNBC: The Tiangong 1, or "Heavenly Palace," is an eight-ton unmanned space lab that will function as a test bed for China's developing space technologies. The main task of the lab will be to experiment with rendezvous and docking between spacecraft; it's scheduled to rendezvous and dock with an unmanned Shenzhou 8 spacecraft a few weeks after launch. China's space program has been compared, in its level of technological development, to that of NASA's Gemini program, which launched 10 manned flights between 1965 and 1966.

Tiangong 1 will launch from a site in the Gobi Desert around September 27–30.

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

BBC: Highly focused microwaves can be used to extract useful chemical compounds from waste food products, and that processing could take place in homes as well as on an industrial scale. The new technology activates cellulose to release chemicals, can process anything with cellulose in it, and is especially effective with paper and cardboard items. The complexities of global food supply produce a great deal of waste throughout the supply chain; harnessing this material on behalf of the materials and biofuels industries would address the growing problem of waste disposal and provide a renewable source of carbon. A demonstration facility is planned for York, UK, later in 2011.

New Scientist: In 1952 Alan Turing introduced the best-known version of his eponymous test of artificial intelligence: If a human talking to a machine believes he or she is talking to a human, the machine has passed the test. Cleverbot, software created by Rollo Carpenter, passed a formal Turing test at the Techniche festival in Guwahati, India, on 3 September. Carpenter says passing the test indicates the ability to imitate intelligence, rather than proving the presence of intelligence itself. During the test, 30 volunteers conducted a typed 4-minute conversation with an unknown entity. Half of them conversed with humans, while the other half conversed with Cleverbot. The software was judged to be human by 59.3% of the people who interacted with it—not far off from the 63.3% of actual humans judged as such during the test.

Economist: A Fermilab astrophysicist has used his analytical skills to come up with a more efficient way to board planes. Most people are familiar with the usual holdups when boarding: waiting for the person ahead to stow his or her luggage, and having to dislodge seated passengers to get to a center or window seat. Jason Steffen’s method minimizes the former and eliminates the latter. He proposes boarding passengers in all the window seats first, then center, then aisle, starting at the back of the plane and moving forward, and boarding by alternate rows, so passengers are spaced far enough apart to stow their luggage at the same time. In tests conducted by Steffen and Hollywood producer Jon Hotchkiss, Steffen’s method took half the time of the current block boarding method used by most airlines, in which passengers are assigned to groups or zones within the cabin. Now all he has to do is persuade the airlines to adopt it. Steffen has published his findings in the Journal of Air Transport Management.

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

Chronicle of Higher Education: University campuses across Mexico are on alert after two professors were injured by a package bomb at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education earlier this August. Both men are expected to recover. The incident was the latest in a series of attacks by a terror group (or a single person posing as such) that calls itself "Individualities Tending Toward Savagery" and credits Theodore Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, as an inspiration. The group's rhetorical style may indicate affiliation with a college, according to one analyst, who also helped identify the Unabomber. In an online statement claiming credit for the Monterrey Institute bombing, the group cites fears that the rapid acceleration of nanotechnology will lead to the development of self-replicating nanomachines. The University of the Americas, Puebla, the first Mexican institution to offer an undergraduate nanotechnology major, has sent an email message to all students, professors, and staff, warning them not to open suspicious packages. And Mexican law enforcement has called on universities across the country to strengthen their security.

Los Angeles Times: The Savannah, one of only four nuclear-powered cargo and passenger ships ever built, and the only one built in the US, resides at Pier 13 of the Canton Marine Terminal in Baltimore, Maryland. President Eisenhower proposed building the vessel in 1955 to promote the nonmilitary use of nuclear energy. It was not intended to be commercially competitive, but rather to demonstrate the feasibility of nuclear propulsion for merchant ships. Yet the design reflected the aesthetics of a yacht rather than a cargo vessel. The Savannah was in service until 1972, when the Nixon administration decided to stop subsidizing the project. Still owned and maintained by the Federal Maritime Administration and regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the ship is opened to visitors from time to time.

BBC: The number of students studying A-level physics in the UK has increased for the fifth consecutive year, by about 6.1% from last year, writes Pallab Ghosh for the BBC. Commentators attribute the increase in part to the geek chic image being promoted by such TV sitcoms as The Big Bang Theory. Also, the BBC’s designation of 2010 as the Year of Science resulted in a number of new science programs, such as Brian Cox’s popular Wonders of the Solar System and Wonders of the Universe. Other possible factors include the current economy, which may be causing students to think more about their future employment prospects. Nevertheless, Imran Khan, director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering, cautions that people shouldn't get too carried away by those results: "Despite physics breaking into the top 10 A-levels subjects this year, we've only just got back to 2002 levels in terms of entries.” A gap still exists between the number of people with science and tech training and employer demand, according to Neil Bentley, deputy director general of the Confederation of British Industry.

Washington Post: A recent federal study found that screening heavy smokers and former smokers who are 55–74 years old reduced by 20% the chances of their dying of lung cancer. As a result, CT scans are being used more frequently to screen people for lung cancer, prompting significant disagreement about how widely the testing should be done. Lung cancer, the leading cause of cancer death in the US, is still difficult to treat, partly because it's often diagnosed late. The three-dimensional images created by CT scans are more detailed than 2D x rays and, therefore, more likely to reveal small tumors in the lungs, earlier in the course of the disease. The potential downside is that greater detail can produce more false positives, and follow-up procedures, such as biopsy and surgery, have significant risks of their own; of the 16 patients in the study who died of follow-up procedures, 6 did not have cancer. Some testing centers are offering CT scans to patients outside the age and risk profile of the test participants, which may increase the false-positive rate as well as the number of unnecessary and risky follow-up procedures performed.

Nature: Membership in the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE) carries a tremendous amount of prestige. Not only are members supposed to represent the country's best researchers, they are often invited to sit on powerful government committees and offered significant official rank and access to material wealth. Pursuit of membership in these societies can involve both intensive lobbying and bribery. With this year's academy elections already underway, both societies have promised to clean up the process. They have published their shortlists and invited public comment at every stage of selection, which has led to a quicker and more thorough investigation of allegations of misconduct. The CAE has also begun to restrict the kind of well-financed election campaigns that have been run in the past by nonacademic groups such as companies and government agencies; this year several nominated government officials and company executives, including the deputy mayor of Shanghai and the chairman of oil giant Sinopec, failed to make the CAE shortlist. Gu Haibin, of the Renmin University of China, believes that the academies' efforts don't address guan ben wei, the belief that political power and status is more important than any other achievement, and until they do, problems with their elections will continue.

BBC: Volunteers can help the Large Hadron Collider team with the search for new fundamental particles by participating in LHC@home 2.0. Part of the search for the new particles, including the Higgs, involves simulating particle collisions and comparing the results with data from actual collisions at the LHC; home computers are now advanced enough to provide some of the necessary computing power to conduct the simulations. The simulations provide a theoretical reference for the LHC collisions. Discrepancies between the simulations and the collision data most often indicate the need to refine the simulation models or their parameters, but they can also reveal new phenomena that existing theory doesn't account for. Other "citizen science" projects making use of the public's home computers are Folding@home, which studies protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases, and SETI@home, which uses home computers to download and analyze radio telescope data in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Telegraph: “Not many girls appreciate how much fun science can be,” according to 14-year-old Samara Villion, who was participating in a school program at the Royal Institution of Great Britain’s Young Scientist Centre. Although more women are pursuing careers in science, writes Sally Williams for the Telegraph, studies show that men still dominate the field. Williams interviews several women scientists in the UK and highlights British scientific institutions that are working to address the gender disparity.

The Guardian: Radium, americium, and uranium are not usual household items. Richard Handl of Stockholm, Sweden, who was trying to break nuclei apart in his kitchen, had all three elements in his apartment when police came to arrest him on charges of unauthorized possession of nuclear material. He stated that he had always been interested in physics and chemistry, and he wanted to see if it was possible to do nuclear fission at home. Handl had kept a blog of his experiments and had apparently tried to set up a nuclear reactor in his home for months. When he realized that what he was doing might not be legal, he sent an inquiry to Sweden's radiation authority, who responded by sending the police to investigate. The police have so far refused to comment on the investigation. If convicted, Handl could face fines or up to two years in prison.

National Geographic: India's plan to build the world's largest nuclear power plant at Jaitapur, a port city 250 miles south of Mumbai, faces vigorous, sometimes violent opposition from the city's inhabitants. And as National Geographic's Rebecca Byerly, the power plant serves as a focus for a wider debate within India about nuclear power. Most of India's households lack direct access to electricity. Meeting that need through nuclear power is, according to the Indian government, the cleanest, cheapest option. Whether nuclear power is also the safest option is the principal point of contention, especially in the wake of the meltdown at Japan's Fukushima Dai'ichi power plant in March.

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

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

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

Chronicle of Higher Education: Nancy Linde manages educational outreach for WGBH, Boston's PBS and NPR stations. In a commentary for the Chronicle, she argues that scientists who want girls to become science majors should adopt the practices of professional marketers. WGBH recently teamed up with the Association for Computing Machinery to form New Image for Computing, an initiative to transform the image of computing among girls. Thanks to funding from NSF, Linde and her colleagues worked with New York–based marketing firms and discovered that some of their assumptions about outreach were mistaken. She distills her experience in three lessons:

1. Whether your project is small or large, know your audience. And you don't need to hire a marketing firm from Manhattan. For the price of a round of snacks, you can convene a couple of focus groups and gather a wealth of data.

2. Test every communication document, whether print or online, with your target audience. Then redesign and test, test again.

3. Assume nothing. One of the classic missteps in trying to attract students to computer science lies in the fact that people in the field are often the ones who design and write the communication brochures and recruitment pamphlets. They often assume, misguidedly, that the messages that resonate with them will also appeal to their target audience. That is rarely the case.
   

Following those principles, New Image for Computing created Dot Diva, a website of resources for girls who want to learn about computing. As if to underline lesson 2, the name of the website was not the one Linde and her fellow team members favored. It was the name that girls said they liked the best.

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

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

PhysOrg: Lloyd Smith, an associate professor at Washington State University's School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, recently investigated three questions of relevance to major league baseball: Can a baseball be hit farther with a corked bat? Is there evidence that the baseball is livelier today than in earlier years? Can storing baseballs in a temperature- or humidity-controlled environment significantly affect home-run production? Smith, working with colleagues from the University of Illinois and Kettering University, tested all three premises at his Sports Science Laboratory on the Pullman campus. "I've got the cool machine that can do the tests," said Smith. He has published descriptions of his experiments and their results in his article "Corked Bats, Juiced Balls, and Humidors: The Physics of Cheating in Baseball" in this month's American Journal of Physics.

New York Times: The Skilled Veteran Corps has been both lionized as a group of self-sacrificing patriots and derided as a would-be suicide corps, writes Ken Belson for the New York Times. The man who founded it, however, has neither extreme in mind; he simply thinks that it would be a good idea for retired engineers and other specialists with applicable skills to assist with the cleanup efforts at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. Yasuteru Yamada, a 72-year-old retired engineer, founded the group in early April with Nobuhiro Shiotani, a childhood friend and fellow engineer. Yamada, via his blog, called on people over age 60 who had the necessary physical strength and relevant skills to volunteer. About 400 people have volunteered thus far and donations are at about 4.3 million yen ($54 000). The Japanese government is beginning to accept the idea, after some initial skepticism; Yamada and Shiotani say that dealing with officials at Tokyo Electric Power may be the most difficult part of their job. Tepco has said that it is highly appreciative of the offer of help and that it is still assessing what the volunteers are capable of doing and ways to ensure their safety.

BBC: Precise prediction of catastrophic climate events remains impossible for even the best computer models, according to Paul Valdes of Bristol University in the UK. Models have not been able to "predict" at least four major transformations in the past: the rapidly rising temperatures of the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, the drying trend over North Africa, the serial weakening or shutting down of the Gulf Stream, and the sharp warmings recorded in Greenland ice cores. "State-of-the-art climate models are largely untested against actual occurrences of abrupt change," writes Valdes in a commentary published in Nature Geoscience. "It is a huge leap of faith to assume that simulations of the coming century with these models will provide reliable warning of sudden, catastrophic events." Valdes believes that Earth's climate is sensitive to small changes and suspects computer models are underestimating climate change.

Chicago Tribune: The Las Conchas fire in New Mexico has spread to within one mile of Los Alamos National Laboratory, and voluntary evacuations have been issued for the towns of Los Alamos and nearby White Rock. New Mexico governor Susana Martinez dispatched the National Guard to assist with evacuation efforts. The fire started Sunday afternoon about 12 miles southwest of Los Alamos and spread over approximately 3500 acres. LLNL is closed today due to the fire; its emergency operations center has been established, and emergency crews are working in the lab to protect hazardous and radioactive facilities, and the lab's proton accelerator and supercomputing centers.

New Scientist: "In an age of precision engineering and on-demand manufacturing, when we can manipulate atoms and print nanosized-circuits for pennies, why do most of us still struggle to find clothes that fit?" asks Duncan Graham-Rowe for New Scientist. Because the cost of custom-tailored, hand-made outfits is prohibitive for most people, a €23 million ($33 million) European research project has been set up to completely automate the process. Called Leadership for European Apparel Production From Research along Original Guidelines (Leapfrog), the project not only makes use of current technology (such as laser scanners that precisely measure body size) but also has come up with a few innovations of its own. One is an automated tailor’s dummy that can change size and shape via a hydraulic system of wires, pipes, pistons, and valves, and even produce an array of pins that push out through its flexible mesh skin to hold pieces of fabric in place. Creating a prototype robot-only production line capable of turning out a suit jacket is more ambitious than it might seem, however, said project coordinator Lutz Walter of the Belgium-based European Apparel and Textile Confederation. Although the Leapfrog group has tested its automated production line by creating a simple jacket, the prototype still lacks sleeves, pockets, buttons, and a lining. It will be some time before the first completely machine-made suit hits the stores.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daily Mail: Studies conducted by Pierre Pica of CNRS in France and his colleagues suggest that geometry skills are innate in humans, according to their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The group studied 8 children and 22 adults of the Amazon tribe known as the Mundurucu, using 30 French and US adults and children as a control group. All participants were asked questions about lines, planes, angles, triangles, and spheres. The Mundurucu people's responses to the questions were roughly as accurate as those of the French and US respondents; they seemed to have an intuition about lines and geometric shapes without formal education or even the relevant words. The Amazonian tribe test results “suggest Euclidean geometry, inasmuch as it concerns basic objects ... , is a cross-cultural universal that results from the inherent properties of the human mind as it develops in its natural environment,” according to the paper's authors.

BBC: Ancient Egyptians used mud bricks to build houses, tombs, and temples. Because the bricks are denser than sand, the thermal signatures of the two materials are different. As the BBC's Frances Cronin reports, Egyptologist Sarah Parcak of the University of Alabama at Birmingham exploits those differences to hunt for ancient cities that have been hidden for millennia beneath meters of accumulated sand. The locations of the cities show up in high-resolution IR images taken by satellites. By examining the images, Parcak and her collaborators have found 3000 settlements, 1000 tombs, and 17 pyramids—all previously unknown to archaeologists.

Wired: This June, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is expected to declare that all vehicles must contain an event data recorder, which would record vehicle inputs and, in the event of a crash, provide a snapshot of the final moments before impact. Many cars manufactured now already have the devices, writes Keith Barry for Wired. Since the early 1990s, General Motors has installed them in most vehicles that have airbags. For the most part, the data have been used by automakers for diagnostic purposes, to determine whether vehicle systems, driver error, or a combination of the two contributed to an accident, and to find out which vehicle systems prevented serious injuries or death. The data have also been used to assess the merit of vehicle-defect claims, the results of which can either vindicate the manufacturer or lead to a recall. No federal laws govern access to the data; 13 states require a warrant and 37 have no statutes barring the disclosure of such data.

Nature: A physics student at the University of Texas at Austin has been unjustly imprisoned in Iran since February, according to his colleagues. Omid Kokabee is an atomic molecular physicist who works with lasers and previously worked in nonlinear optics, but he has nothing to do with nuclear physics, write Michele Catanzaro and Eugenie Samuel Reich for Nature. He returned home to visit his parents over the winter break, and never returned. According to Kaleme, an online magazine affiliated with the Iranian political opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Kokabee was arrested as he tried to catch his flight back to the US from Imam Khomeini International Airport and was brought to Evin prison in Tehran, where he was placed in solitary confinement and interrogated. Nature has not been able to verify these claims. Kokabee graduated in 2005 from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, worked for several companies in Iran, and in 2007 moved to the Institute of Photonic Sciences (IFCO) in Barcelona, Spain, to work as a research assistant. He moved to Austin in August 2010 for his PhD studies at the University of Texas.

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

New Scientist: Among the systems currently considered to be at risk of a terrorist or military attack are the electrical grid, the air transport network, the banking system, and the internet, writes Mark Buchanan for New Scientist. However, Christian Schneider, a physicist at ETH Zürich, and his colleagues have found that when large technological networks undergo minor changes, which would multiply the paths along which information flows, their security can be greatly improved. The researchers, who have published their results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used a computer model to study the effects of rewiring a network and found that changing even just 2% of the links in a system could have a huge positive effect. An increase in the number of alternative paths connecting any two points means that the network remains more highly connected even when some key spots get taken out. "This represents a significant step towards a better understanding of how vital networks can be better protected against malicious attacks," says physicist Hernan Makse of the City College of New York.

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

Science: In a recent report, an eight-member panel convened by the National Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council, which advises the US Geological Survey (USGS), concluded that the New Madrid fault system is at significant risk for severe earthquakes. Quakes along the 150-mile-long fault can potentially threaten the US states of Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi. The panel recommended that construction in those states should continue to meet quake-resistant standards. But seismologists debate the degree of risk. Recent GPS measurements of land shifts show that very little crustal deformation has occurred in the area. Seth Stein of Northwestern University believes that the lack of crustal deformation indicates that stress in the New Madrid fault has wound down and that consequently there is little risk of earthquakes. The USGS advisory panel, however, wasn't sanguine about taking that evidence as proof of reduced risk to the area and will stick with its assessment, at least until more data become available.

Nature: Environmental groups and their supporters spend more money on climate-change and clean-energy activities and campaigns than skeptical conservative groups and their industry supporters, according to the report Climate Shift: Clear Vision for the Next Decade of Public Debate. Published by Matthew Nisbet, associate professor of communication at American University in Washington, DC, the report questions some of the most common reasons given for US political inaction on global warming. One common misperception, he claims, is that media attempts at balance give too much coverage to the small minority of climate-change skeptics, whereas he found that not to be true. In fact, the report finds that during 2009 and 2010, some 9 out of 10 news and opinion articles about climate change in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN.com reflected the consensus scientific position, writes David Adam for Nature. The recent failure in US cap-and-trade legislation, Nisbet concludes, was not due to a lack of money or a problem in communicating the message, but rather to the framing of global warming as a problem that could be solved by a single specific policy.

Space.com: The first person in space, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, made his flight 50 years ago on 12 April 1961. Now there is a new space race that is centering on space tourism, writes Clara Moskowitz for Space.com. Commercial companies are gearing up to send the first paying passengers to space on private spaceships. "It's an exciting time for the industry," said George Whitesides, president of suborbital spaceship company Virgin Galactic. "I really believe that we're at the edge of an extraordinary period of innovation which will radically change our world." The first flights will take passengers to an altitude of about 100 km, where they will experience about five minutes of weightlessness before returning to Earth. Although Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane is still being tested, regular tourist flights could start as early as 2012.

Physics Today: Martin Rees may be the first atheist to win the Templeton Prize, which used to have the word "religion" in its title. Now the prize "honors a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works." The selection of Rees, an astrophysicist and cosmologist at the University of Cambridge, was announced on 6 April.

The annual prize was founded in 1972 by financier John Templeton. Mother Teresa, Billy Graham, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn are among the best-known laureates, but religious leaders of many faiths, businessmen, and philosophers also have been awarded the prize. In the past decade, seven of the recipients have been physicists. The purse always exceeds that of the Nobel Prize; this year it is $1.6 million.

"I see my work as having connections to big questions. I have focused on as yet unsolved problems in cosmology," said Rees. "Of course, issues of cosmology, physical laws, the question 'Is there life in space?' have philosophical and religious implications. I have no religious beliefs, but I am not allergic to religion." Rees has authored or coauthored 10 books; his latest, What We Still Don't Know, will come out next year and deals with whether there are intrinsic limits to scientific knowledge, the possibility of organic or inorganic post-human evolution, extraterrestrial life, and the mulitverse.

In his acceptance speech, Rees said, "Our planet has existed for 45 million centuries, but this is the first [time] in its history where one species—ours—has Earth's future in its hands, and could jeopardize not only itself, but life's immense potential." That is why, he continued, over the past decade he has become "more engaged with issues of science policy and ethics, and global problems generally."

Elaborating, Rees told Physics Today that the two main threats to the planet are "that there are more of us, and we are collectively having more impact on the biosphere," and "because individuals are more empowered by technology, we as a society are more vulnerable to small groups of people. Those are the difficulties of governance we will have to contend with."

Toni Feder

New York Times: In India, writes Andrew Revkin for the New York Times, cheap technology is widening the gender gap—but not the kind related to jobs and salaries. A combination of rising incomes, availability of ultrasound, and cultural norms that strongly favor boys over girls has resulted in a distorted ratio of female to male children in that country. In 1991 the ratio was 945:1000, in 2001 it was 927:1000, and this year it’s 914:1000. And India is not the only country where this is occurring—China and Vietnam are witnessing a similar trend. For more on the subject, read Diksha Sahni's blog post for the Wall Street Journal.

Chronicle of Higher Education: Cornell University's Philip Davis has just published a study that looked into the impact of making research papers freely available online. Seven academic publishers gave Davis the power to grant free access to 20% of articles in 36 different journals. The free articles, which Davis selected randomly, were downloaded more than twice as often as were the articles that remained behind access controls. The free articles didn't, however, garner more citations than the unfree articles. In an interview with the Chronicle's Ben Wieder, Davis notes that a paper's citations originate from a small group of specialists, who, like most researchers, already have what amounts to free access either through their institutions or informally through their collaborators. A paper's readership is wider. Now that it can be quantified, readership should perhaps be included alongside citations when assessing a paper's impact, said Davis.

Economist: Although a British scientist, Lewis Fry Richardson, published a statistical analysis as early as 1948 of the frequency and severity of wars , his results to date have not had much impact. However, in a paper under review for Science, Neil Johnson, a physicist at the University of Miami in Florida, and colleagues have shown that Richardson’s findings can be used to forecast the course and severity of terrorist and insurgent attacks. Using data on insurgencies against American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, Johnson and his team found that they could predict the future course of a local insurgency by knowing the number of days between the first and second attacks. The formula they developed depicts a progress curve with two antagonistic groups in a constant competition that leads to stasis as each adaptation by one side is countered by an adaptation by the other.

Various: Despite three weeks of effort by employees in trying and dangerous conditions, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) has not been able to cool reactors 1–4 at its Fukushima I power plant in northeastern Japan. Tepco chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata pledged maximum efforts to stabilize them and added that they would have to be shut down for good. The company is still considering whether to decommission the plant's other two reactors, 5 and 6, which appear to be undamaged. It is likely that the entire station will be decomissioned. The entire process may take as long as three decades to complete.

Chronicle of Higher Education: Thanks to web-based tools, one can collect scattered observations and measurements from people living in regions hit by earthquakes, civil wars, and other crises. Other software, known as geographical information systems, can map those measurements and correlate them with other geographically indexed information. The result, as the Chronicle's Marc Parry reports, is that GIS-savvy professors from around the world are teaming up in volunteer networks to produce accurate, current maps of working payphones, blocked roads, and other useful information. The combination of local observations and GIS is proving helpful in the wake of this year's earthquake and tsunami in Japan and in the ongoing civil war in Libya.

Various: It's still too dangerous for humans to look inside three reactors at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Instead, robots and remote cameras will give operators details of the conditions. Other remote tools, such as unmanned fire engines, will help douse the reactors, writes David Hambling for New Scientist. This may be the start of a long robotic engagement. "I would anticipate that we are going to see a phenomenal enterprise of remote work systems that are brought to bear over the weeks, months, and years of recovering Fukushima," says Carnegie Mellon University robotics researcher Red Whittaker to NPR's Geoff Brumfiel.

New York Times: Hong Kong’s anti-pollution organization, the Clean Air Network, has launched a new effort to raise awareness and fight for clean air: an art auction. Fifty-one environment-inspired works of modern art went on display Monday in Hong Kong’s financial district. Sotheby’s will auction them off on 4 April, part of the auction house’s twice-yearly sale of contemporary Asian art. Many of the artists, who include well-known names from Hong Kong and elsewhere, created works especially for the event. The Clean Air Network has tried imaginative approaches to campaigning before, including a spoof infomercial featuring Hong Kong actor Daniel Wu selling canisters of “fresh air,” which became an instant hit among YouTube users. In her New York Times's article, Bettina Wassener describes some of the pieces to be auctioned.

The Independent: A medical trainer and a Hollywood special-effects artist have teamed up to produce more realistic training dummies for university hospitals. Jane Kleinman, who trains future doctors and nurses at Loma Linda Hospital in East Los Angeles, got the idea to form the company Simureal when she saw the realistic scene in the movie 127 Hours in which James Franco’s character amputates his own arm with a blunt penknife. Kleinman tracked down the arm’s creator, Tony Gardner, and together they are using his state-of-the-art expertise to create silicone training aids. "It's incredible for a guy like me, who’s worked in film for years, to realize that the stuff we do can also affect people in the real world, in a life-or-death situation," said Gardner at his workshop in the LA suburb of Irwindale last week.

New York Times: The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, a Vienna-based arm of the United Nations, has released a forecast of where and when the winds blowing over Japan will carry the radiation emanating from Japan's tsunami-stricken nuclear reactors. The forecast predicts that the radiation plume will reach the Aleutian Islands today and Southern California late tomorrow. As the New York Times's William Broad reports, the UN forecast does not specify how much radiation will reach the US, but the level is expected to be harmless.

New York Times: Besides the much-reported aftermath in Japan, last Friday’s earthquake also caused global effects: It moved Japan’s coastline, tilted Earth’s axis slightly, and shortened the length of the day. Japan is “wider than it was before,” said Ross Stein, a geophysicist at the US Geological Survey. Global positioning stations closest to the epicenter jumped 4 meters closer to the US. The earthquake also shifted Earth’s figure axis—the axis that Earth’s mass is balanced around—by 16 cm where it intersects the surface of the planet. By shifting the planet’s mass closer to its center, the earthquake also caused Earth’s rotation to speed up, shortening the day by 1.8 microseconds. None of this is unusual, however. “The Earth is always wobbling, and the length of the day is always changing,” said Richard Gross, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Science: Some in the field of taxonomy are hoping to make use of amateur scientists much as the popular GalaxyZoo has done with citizen astronomers. As funds and professional practitioners dwindle, and the number of extinctions rises, scientists are pushing to identify and catalog organisms. Proponents of the plan to use amateurs say that although taxonomy has grown to be quite specialized, technological advances are helping lower the bar for participating. There are already several science programs that take advantage of amateurs’ input: among them Project Feeder Watch, which asks the public to identify backyard birds, and Encyclopedia of Life, which seeks photos, videos, and information on all forms of life. Others fear that research quality could suffer if amateurs flock to “attractive” creatures such as birds and beetles and ignore the less attractive ones, such as jellyfish and nematodes.

Science: Archaeologists are criticizing the ethics of a planned Smithsonian Institution exhibit, Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds, slated to open in 2012. The exhibit is based on artifacts hauled up from an Arab dhow that sank to the bottom of the Java Sea in the 9th century CE. Critics say that the German company that salvaged the wreck, Seabed Explorations, did not observe professional archaeological standards while recovering the artifacts and later sold them to a second company in Singapore. Such commercialization of ancient objects doesn't break the laws of Indonesia, in whose territorial waters the dhow was found, but many archaeologists say that it contravenes their field's standard ethical guidelines. In addition, notes Ted Schultz, chair of the National Museum of Natural History Senate of Scientists, "We believe that substantial scientific information was lost due to the methods employed."

Guardian: A declassified and heavily redacted report from Britain's defense ministry has raised concerns about the robustness of the pressurized water reactors in the Royal Navy's fleet of 11 nuclear-powered submarines. The report notes that the reactors lack safety features that are now standard in civilian reactors. In particular, the reactors' primary circuits, if compromised, could lead to the release of highly reactive fission products. The design flaw is troubling because the four nuclear submarines in the Vanguard class carry nuclear missiles.

Science: Investigative files released yesterday to a climate science blog by an unnamed US lawmaker suggest a new twist in the ongoing University of East Anglia climate e-mails saga, writes Eli Kintisch for Science. Other online writers argue that the files contain evidence that a government climate scientist in May 2008 deliberately deleted e-mails related to a major climate report. The scientist, Eugene Wahl of the National Climatic Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, admits to deleting the e-mails, but he says online reports on the investigative files have misconstrued a central point: Embattled climatologist Michael Mann did not ask him to delete them. Mann, whom Science reached on vacation in Hawaii, confirmed, “I didn't delete any e-mails and nor did I tell Wahl to delete any e-mails."

Nature: Some 2500 Spanish scientists, including 150 full professors and 4 research-center directors, have sent a petition to José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the country's prime minister, asking for changes to a science and technology law currently being debated in the country's parliament, writes Michele Catanzaro for Nature. The petition, delivered in a letter on 22 February, is the latest move in a sustained campaign by Spanish researchers to improve long-term planning of research. Among their requests is that tenure-track opportunities be restored to the latest bill and that the state research agency the bill is creating remain independent of the government.

Chronicle of Higher Education: This year's TED conference winds down today in Long Beach, California. Short for Technology, Entertainment, Design, TED features short talks by eloquent, engaging experts from diverse fields, including the physical sciences. As the Chronicle's Jeffrey Young explains, TED is unlike the kind of conferences that academics usually attend. Talks are just 18 minutes long, lack question-and-answer sessions at the end, and are professionally videoed and posted on the Web. Among the speakers at this year's event is Aaron O'Connell, who is part of the team that succeeded in nudging a tiny cantilever in and out of its quantum ground state.

Institute of Physics: Physicists and mathematicians from the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain have used mathematical models to show that two languages can coexist in one society. The research, published today in New Journal of Physics (co-owned by the UK's Institute of Physics and the German Physical Society), refutes earlier research that sought to show how one of two languages would inevitably die out. The researchers suggest their work could be used to inform political decisions concerning the protection of endangered languages: "Allowing for varying statuses and interlinguistic similarity could suggest further and more precise political guidelines for protecting endangered tongues, as well as illuminating the evolution of the language entities themselves."

Science: Although species naturally come and go over long periods of time, a new study says that Earth’s creatures are on the brink of a mass extinction, the sixth in its history, writes Ann Gibbons for Science. A mass extinction is defined as when three-quarters of all species vanish quickly, such as the dinosaur disappearance 65 million years ago after an asteroid struck Earth. Conservationists have warned for years that we are in the midst of a human-caused extinction, with species from frogs to birds to tigers threatened by climate change, disease, loss of habitat, and competition for resources with nonnative species. The study’s lead author, Anthony Barnosky of the University of California, Berkeley, says, "This is really gloom-and-doom stuff. But the good news is we haven't come so far down the road that it's inevitable." If humans work quickly to protect endangered and threatened species and their habitats now, the mass extinction can be prevented or at least delayed by thousands of years.

BBC: Researchers in the UK and Singapore have demonstrated the highest-resolution optical microscope ever—imaging objects down to just 50 nanometers. Ordinarily, it's impossible to use visible light to resolve objects smaller than its wavelength (380–750 nm). However, you can beat this diffraction limit by detecting "evanescent" waves, whose intensity falls to zero within one wavelength of the emitter's surface. As reported in Nature Communications, the new technique uses tiny glass beads to gather evanescent light waves and refocus them, channeling them into a standard microscope. It is believed that the technique holds great promise for biological studies, for viewing cells, bacteria, and viruses.

Daily Mail: Water demand in many countries will exceed supply by 40% within 20 years due to the combined threat of climate change and population growth, scientists have warned. About 300 scientists, policymakers, and economists are attending the Connecting Water Resources 2011 conference in Ottawa 28 February–3 March; it is hosted by the Canadian Water Network. The event is a precursor for World Water Day to be held 20–22 March in Cape Town, South Africa. “What people don't often realise is how much water there is in everything we make and buy, from T-shirts to wine,” said Nicholas Parker, chairman of Cleantech Group, an international environmental technology consulting company. A variety of water conservation measures are being proposed.

NPR: NPR’s Robert Krulwich recently made a bet with Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine, who claimed that “there is no species of technology that’s gone globally extinct on this planet”—in other words, there is no tool, no invention ever manufactured by humans that isn’t still being made new today. Krulwich appealed to his readers to come up with suggestions to prove Kelly wrong, which he narrowed to what he thought were three definitely dead technologies: radium suppositories, a Roman corvus (a plank used to board enemy ships), and the memory device inside a 1950s jukebox. Kelly proves him wrong, in this entertaining NPR blog.

Science: In 2007 astronomer Chris Lintott, who works at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, and colleagues were drowning under a data deluge—1 million images of galaxies to characterize and only one graduate student to do it. So they set up a website, called Galaxy Zoo, to recruit volunteer citizen scientists to help. The project was so successful—it attracted about 375 000 people working from the comfort of their own homes—that it was expanded to other projects, including studies of the Moon and an analysis of old ship logs for climate data. In Eli Kintisch’s article for Science, Lintott offers some suggestions to scientists for successful partnerships with armchair researchers.

New York Times: Five of nine multibillion-dollar solar thermal power plants planned for the Southern California desert are facing legal challenges. As the New York Times's Todd Woody reports, the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations claim that the plants would threaten fragile ecosystems. Another challenge facing the plants is financial. When the plants were originally proposed, solar thermal generators, which convert light into electricity via heat, were cheaper than solar panels, which convert light directly into electricity. Now, thanks to the advent of mass-produced solar panels from China, that price advantage has disappeared.

Guardian: Electricity networks and GPS satellites are increasingly vulnerable to damage by turbulent solar weather, scientists say. "This issue of space weather has got to be taken seriously," said John Beddington, the UK government's chief scientific adviser, speaking last week at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, DC. A severe solar storm could damage satellites and power grids around the world, he said, leading to a "global Katrina" costing the world's economies as much as $2 trillion. The Guardian's Alok Jha explains why.

Guardian: Biology is providing surprising insights into the financial crisis that brought the banking system to its knees, according to Ehsan Masood, editor of Research Fortnight. Over a period of several weeks, Masood worked with biologists who were advising the Bank of England on how to reform global finance, as part of a documentary for BBC Radio 4. Ecologist and former government chief scientific adviser Robert May and others made the case that the most stable ecosystems are those with a diversity of species; less stable ecosystems have less diversity and a higher degree of connectedness between species. Their results, published in Nature, revealed that the banking system was relatively homogeneous—with many banks having similar characteristics and doing the same things—and also super-connected.

New York Times: If you’re itching to visit the new advanced waste management plant that will open in 2016 in Copenhagen, be sure to bring your skis, writes Jim Witkin for the New York Times. An urban ski park will cover the plant, which will incinerate the waste from five municipalities to generate heat and electricity for 140 000 homes. While their trash is burning inside, locals will be able to take an elevator to the top of the building, then ski down one of three different slopes. Although municipal incinerators in Europe often take on decorative coverings to overcome negative public perceptions, the Copenhagen plant will be the first to engage the public in a sport. Designers call it “hedonistic sustainability”—sustainable cities and buildings that actually increase the quality of life.

New York Times: During the recent turmoil in Egypt, in a span of minutes just after midnight on 28 January, a technologically advanced, densely wired country with more than 20 million people online was essentially severed from the global internet for a span of five days. Because the internet’s legendary robustness and ability to route around blockages are part of its basic design, even the world’s most renowned network and telecommunications engineers have been perplexed that the Mubarak government succeeded in pulling the maneuver off. The event also raised concerns among the worldwide technical community that with unrest coursing through the Middle East, other autocratic governments could follow suit. In the New York Times, James Glanz and John Markoff give an in-depth look at how Egypt disappeared from the internet.

New Scientist: The answer to that question could have legal implications. Currently, US police need a warrant to search a suspect’s personal home computer, which is protected by the Fourth Amendment. A recent ruling in January allowed police to search a suspect’s cell phone without a warrant—a decision that angered many because cell phones are now so advanced that access to the phone allows almost the same level of insight into one’s life as seizure of a home computer. If a cell phone, and all it contains, is now officially a computer, can this be used as a defense to prevent the authorities seizing it when they carry out a search? No one really knows until it is tested in court, writes Niall Firth for New Scientist, but it is an interesting development and shows how advances in technology can muddle even the clearest of legal matters.

New Scientist: Artificial intelligence hits prime time this week when a computer squares off against two human opponents on the popular quiz show Jeopardy! Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, is one of the most advanced supercomputers to date. In a first-of-its-kind competition, Watson will face two former Jeopardy! champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. In a related article, the New York Times’s John Markoff reflects on the subject of artificial intelligence and its history since the dawn of the modern computer era.

Chronicle of Higher Education: "Scientists are wasting much of the data they are creating." Thus begins Josh Fischman's Chronicle news story about a recent and paradoxical trend. As computers become more powerful and disk drives become more capacious, researchers are finding that they cannot easily make use of the troves of data that they and their colleagues are creating. Besides the shear volume of data being produced by the world's labs, another big problem is the incompatibility of data across studies and disciplines. Standardizing formats and tagging would help, as would central, easy-to-use data depositories.

Travel and Leisure: Joshua Bernstein, writing for Travel and Leisure magazine, profiles some of the world’s most visionary cities. From Seoul’s planned Nam June Paik Media Bridge—with gardens, a library, museum, and stores—to Cleveland’s shopping-mall greenhouse, which grows vegetables for the weekly farmers’ market, some cities are taking unique approaches to redefine how they function. Because traffic is one of the biggest and most visible issues plaguing cities, Hangzhou, China, has implemented a novel bike-share program, and Curitiba, Brazil, has developed a rapid transit bus system that rivals a subway for speed and efficiency.

New Scientist: An industrial robot from the 1970s made its stage debut last month at the Southbank Centre in London in a production called Sans Objet. In the production, two acrobats interact with the robot on stage, while an operator controls it from backstage. The piece is a power struggle between man and machine where boundaries between the two become blurred: At times, the robot becomes humanized and the people appear robotic. Sandrine Ceurstemont reviews the unusual performance for New Scientist.

Nature: Psychologists Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, recently conducted a study to explore the persistent shortage of women in physics, computer science, and engineering. Their analysis, published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, contrasts with reports that suggest overt discrimination remains a significant problem. Ceci and Williams conclude, instead, that female researchers lag behind their male counterparts in professional advancement because of a broader set of societal realities, which include raising a family and gender expectations.

Science: In an Issues & Perspectives column, guest contributor Kathy Weston looks back on her career as a molecular biologist and on her decision to leave a tenure-track position at the University of London. Weston frankly acknowledges her own failings, especially her lack of confidence. In retrospect, she wishes she had found a mentor, and "taken more scientific risks, gone for bigger stakes, and thought harder about direction." As for the system, she writes,

It failed too, I think. Scientists are judged almost entirely on research output, measured by papers published in the most prominent journals, and grants are not awarded unless your work is competitive at the highest level. Trying to run a lab full time with small children at home is very likely to result in a drop in research productivity or quality, and yet little allowance is made for those of us, mostly women, who find ourselves in this situation.

South Bend Tribune: Science cafés, lectures on current science topics held in casual settings like pubs and coffeehouses, have been around for the last decade or so. Although the first cafés originated in Europe, they are starting to pop up in the US, writes Yanan Chen for Indiana's South Bend Tribune. At Hudson's Classic Grill restaurant in Jackson, Michigan, for example, programs begin with a short small-group discussion, then the guest speaker makes a 30-minute presentation, followed by an hour of discussion and questions. "You can drink alcohol while listening to the lecture. It is not in a classroom. Be casual," said Laura Thurlow, biology professor at Jackson Community College and science liaison for the city's science café. Organizers say they are trying to make science more accessible to the general public by presenting informal lectures in a relaxed atmosphere.

NPR: Physicist Brian Greene explains his theory regarding multiple, parallel universes, for National Public Radio, as spelled out in his latest book, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. Recent discoveries in physics and astronomy, he says, point to the idea that our universe may be one of many universes populating a grander multiverse. For the past 25 years, Greene has been studying string theory as a way of understanding those multiverses.

Star Advertiser: The Sea-Based X-Band Radar (SBX)—a floating, self-propelled mobile radar station—has been spending a lot of time in Hawaii. Although nominally based at Adak Island in Alaska, it roams the Pacific Ocean to detect incoming ballistic missiles. According to the Missile Defense Agency, the SBX has been habitually returning to Pearl Harbor because it has the “correct mix of labor and supplies to accomplish needed maintenance and repairs.” The SBX’s unusual appearance, a multi-legged platform topped by what looks like a giant golf ball, is becoming a tourist attraction at Ford Island, where it has moored 11 times and spent a combined total of more than a year and a half in port.

NPR: The Federal Aviation Administration has released a report saying that in 2010 there were 2836 reported cases of lasers pointed at aircraft, almost double the 2009 number. According to the FAA, the problem is growing because of a number of factors, such as lasers' increasing availability, decreasing cost, and higher power levels, and the introduction of green lasers, which are more easily seen than red ones. Because lasers have the potential to distract and injure pilots, the FAA asks that any planned use of lasers, such as for light shows or scientific research, be approved in advance.

Science: The European Union–sponsored Study of Open Access Publishing (dubbed the SOAP project) surveyed 50 000 researchers last year for their opinions on open-access journals, which make all their papers freely available online and usually charge authors a fee for each published paper, writes Gretchen Vogel for Science. The study, which released its results last week at a symposium in Berlin, found two main reasons researchers don't submit to open-access journals: Almost 40% said that a lack of funding for publication fees was a deterrent, and 30% cited a lack of high-quality open-access journals in their field. Salvatore Mele, project leader for open access at CERN in Switzerland, says the entire data set and the team's analysis, as well as videos of the symposium, are available via the SOAP project website.

Science: Igor Lukšić, Montenegro's new prime minister and, at 34, the youngest head of state in the world, has in one of his first official acts created a dedicated science ministry for the country. Tanja Vlahovic, previously head of tourism faculty at the Mediterranean University in Bar, will serve as the country's first science minister. The move, however, has sparked some criticism and calls for Montenegro to instead invest more in research.

Science: Pope Benedict XVI has appointed Swiss microbiologist Werner Arber as the new president of the Vatican's scientific advisory body, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Arber, a Protestant, becomes the first non-Catholic to head the organization, which has roots dating back to the early 17th century. He succeeds Italian physicist Nicola Cabibbo, who died in August last year. Edwin Cartlidge, writing for Science, provides a brief biography of Arber.

New York Times: To create the illusion of three dimensions, most currently available 3D television sets rely on careful synchronization. Images intended for the left and right eyes are displayed on the screen in rapid succession. Special glasses that the viewer wears are synchronized with the TV set and ensure that each eye sees the appropriate images. Toshiba has developed a method that dispenses with the glasses, which are somewhat bulky. The method relies instead on aiming the left and right images directly at the viewer's eyes. The innovation is noteworthy not only for its possible impact on the new market for 3D television, but also because the team that developed it was led by a woman, Rieko Fukushima. As the New York Times's Hiroko Tabuchi reports, Toshiba stands out in Japan for its efforts to recruit, retain, and promote its female employees.Twenty percent of Toshiba's R&D staff are women.

Christian Science Monitor: In an interview with the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, Parke Kunkle of the Minnesota Planetarium Society explained something astronomers have known for millennia: that the Sun doesn't actually rise and fall through the constellations on the dates that your horoscope says that it does, and that it actually passes through a 13th constellation, Ophiuchus, the Snake Annoyer. Apparently, the interview rocked the astrological world, leading some believers to worry that they've been referring to themselves as the "wrong" sign for years. Mark Sappenfield of the Christian Science Monitor explains the science behind the "celestial kerfuffle."

Chronicle of Higher Education: After earning a PhD in chemistry at Harvard University, Randy Wedin abandoned his research career, moved back to Minnesota with his wife, and became a stay-at-home father to the couple's four children. Wedin is now a freelance science writer. In a commentary in the Chronicle, he explains how the lessons he learned as a graduate student have helped him be a better father. His first lesson, Sleep Deprivation and Mindless Repetition Are the Keys to Success, comes from the nights he spent in the lab running a series of experiments.

SPACE.com: There's been some pushing and shoving lately to establish a global "Code of Conduct" for outer space—a protection clause for various international factions keen on preventing nefarious actions by others in the final frontier. The big question is, what constitutes misconduct in space? Using space objects for target practice and creating massive, long-lasting debris fields? Not venting a fuel tank, causing it to explode once in space? Writer Leonard David contacted several space industry experts and analysts and reports his results for SPACE.com.

Science: In her most recent Issues & Perspectives column, Science's Beryl Lieff Benderly examines the plight of postdocs at US universities. In particular, she exposes the contradictions implicit in the National Academy of Sciences' Rising Above the Gathering Storm report of 2005 and its 2010 update, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited. The corporate authors of both reports argue for further research funding, which would temporarily benefit postdocs, while acquiescing in the outsourcing of technical jobs, which deprives postdocs of employment opportunities outside academia.

Guardian: Engineers from the UK’s largest defense company, BAE Systems, are using defense technology to help the British Olympic team. Among their successes is a device called Drake that they invented for the sailing team. Drake can model vast amounts of meteorological data by taking and processing readings of the key weather factors, including wind speed and direction and temperature and humidity changes, writes Alok Jha for the Guardian. For the bobsledding team, BAE recruited PhD students to devise a method of customizing each sled for individual athletes. The BAE engineers' next goal is to improve the racing wheelchair used by Paralympians—by using an Airbus wind tunnel to study the wheelchair’s construction and determine the best seating position for different types of races.

New York Times: Joining California and New Mexico, Massachusetts announced last week the target of reducing the state's emission of greenhouse gases to 25% below 1990 levels. As the New York Times's Felicity Barringer reports, to meet the target Massachusetts will implement a set of broad measures aimed at boosting energy efficiency, using more renewable energy, and reducing the state's biggest source of greenhouse gases: automobile emissions. Among the specific policies being considered is tying the cost of auto insurance to mileage. People who drive less would see a reduction in insurance premiums.

BBC: Piers Sellers, a NASA astronaut with three space shuttle flights under his belt, has been appointed an OBE (an Officer of the Order of the British Empire). Sellers was among the Britons whose services were recognized in the UK's traditional New Year's Honors. Born in the UK, Sellers joined NASA's astronaut corps in 1996 after a career spent analyzing Earth's vegetation from data gathered by satellites. He plans to resume his scientific career when he returns to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Space.com: A private individual is raising money to buy a communications satellite to provide free internet service to developing countries. Kosta Grammatis, CEO and founder of ahumanright.org, hopes to purchase the TerreStar-1, a spacecraft that launched in 2009 and is owned by a company that filed for bankruptcy. Grammatis and his team plan to pay the bills by allowing telecommunications companies to buy and resell high-speed bandwidth, even as they provide a slower connection speed for free to everyone. Jeremy Hsu of Space.com conducts a brief interview with Grammatis about his plans.

Daily Mail: Scientists in Japan are designing a robot to explore the Moon—by jumping as if on a pogo stick. Moving on the Moon can be hard work: Humans trying to walk struggle with the lesser gravity, and rovers running on wheels can get stuck in the sand. So lead researcher Atsuo Takanishi at Waseda University in Tokyo and colleagues have developed software simulations showing a robot that uses thrusters to lift it off the ground and land on both feet. They have yet to determine the exact height that works best—too high puts too much stress on the robot’s legs; too low makes it move too slow. Their work was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics in Tianjin, China.

New York Times: An astronomer, C. Martin Gaskell, who in 2007 was a leading candidate for a job running an observatory at the University of Kentucky, is now suing that institution—alleging religious discrimination. Gaskell, an evangelical Christian, claims that he was asked about his religious beliefs during the job interview and because of those beliefs he lost the job. The case represents a rare example, experts say, of a lawsuit by a scientist who alleges academic persecution for his religious faith.

Science: Physicist-turned-businessman-turned-Congressman Bill Foster (D-IL)—who lost his seat in the November midterm elections—says the need for more legislators with scientific backgrounds may serve as the impetus for the next stage of his career. Because Foster thinks his scientific training helped him as a legislator, he is contemplating launching what he calls "Albert's list” (named for Albert Einstein). The initiative would be modeled on EMILY's List, the successful political action committee that was formed in 1985 to advance and protect women's access to abortion. Like EMILY's list, Albert's list would help elect candidates for political office.

Scientific American: Planet Hunters, a recently launched citizen-scientist-powered website, will allow anyone with an internet connection to peruse data gathered by NASA's Kepler spacecraft. The spacecraft's telescope gazes at some 150 000 stars to monitor their brightness over several years. If a planet passes across the face of any of those stars, a sort of partial eclipse known as a transit occurs. By recording the resulting dips in brightness, Kepler's sensors have already discovered eight exoplanets since the spacecraft's launch in March 2009. Several hundred more candidates await confirmation. The Planet Hunters website was launched by some of the same people who produced Galaxy Zoo and Moon Zoo.

Sunday Express: Staff from ATLAS, the biggest particle-physics experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, have recorded an album for Christmas. Chris Thomas, an ATLAS technician who masterminded and produced the Resonance double CD, found a wealth of musical talent among the 3000 ATLAS physicists, technicians, and support staff in Switzerland. One track on Resonance is the "Atlas Boogie," a bluesy introduction to the search for the Higgs boson, or “god particle." Most of Resonance’s 36 tracks are not inspired by science, however, but are a mixture of cover songs and original compositions and range over rock, folk, classical, and Latin.

New Scientist: Activists hope to construct an alternative to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which controls the internet’s domain name system (DNS)—an internet phone book, in essence. They complain that ICANN takes down web domains at the whim of politicians and industry bosses, if the sites are considered to infringe the law, writes Paul Marks for New Scientist. The proposed registry would initially work like existing systems, but would eventually become a decentralized, peer-to-peer system in which volunteers each run a portion of a DNS on their own computers. By breaking up the internet phone book and hosting it in pieces, they would strip ICANN of its power. Any domain it tries to take away would still be accessible on the alternative registry. According to Ben Laurie, a London-based security consultant and a former technical adviser to WikiLeaks, the alternative internet idea is eminently feasible, but persuading everybody to use it is going to be difficult.

Telegraph: The sonic screwdriver used by British sci-fi character Doctor Who could become a real-life tool, capable of moving and manipulating objects using only ultrasonic sound waves. Bruce Drinkwater, an ultrasonics engineer at the University of Bristol, told Richard Gray of the Telegraph, “We have developed a device that allows us to use ultrasonic forces to move small objects like biological cells around to sort them or to assemble them.” Tiny crystals are made to vibrate by passing an electrical current through them, producing an ultrasonic shock wave in the air around them. This shock wave generates a force that can be used to push the cells. In future, by increasing the size of the shock wave, such a device could be used to undo screws, assemble electronics, or put together delicate components.

Nature: Scientists all over the world are increasingly turning to manuscript-editing services, writes Karen Kaplan for the journal Nature. Some authors hope to refine a paper before submitting it to a journal; others aim to correct problems that emerged in peer review. Besides correcting for grammar, spelling, and punctuation, some services can restructure the methodology, incorporate new data, and reformat a manuscript before submission. And as more papers are being submitted to English-language journals from such areas as China, India, the Middle East, and South America, the need for editing services that serve non-English-speaking authors is growing as well.

Guardian: Richard Holmes writes a lengthy article for the Guardian on women in science over the past several centuries, based on information gleaned from the Royal Society of London’s archives. He has found that women played a far more important role in the development and dissemination of science than had previously been thought, citing such trailblazing women as the 18th-century figures Caroline Herschel, who discovered two new comets, and Scottish scientific writer and polymath Mary Somerville. Holmes’s book The Age of Wonder won the Royal Society’s Science Books Prize for 2009.

Nature: The world-renowned Erwin Schrödinger International Institute for Mathematical Physics in Vienna has been rescued from imminent closure after more than 200 international researchers—including Nobel Prize winners and recipients of the Fields Medal—wrote letters of support to the Austrian government, writes Alison Abbott for Nature. But the fate of more than 70 other non-university academic institutes in Austria, most of them in the social sciences and humanities, remains uncertain. The Austrian government made the decisions in order to save money and informed the institutes only at the beginning of November.

NPR: With US help, Kazakhstan has successfully transferred 100 tons of weapons-grade plutonium and uranium—enough to make 800 nuclear bombs—from a cold war–era nuclear power station on the shores of the Caspian Sea to a secret location 2500 km inland. As NPR's Mike Shuster reports, plans for the transfer began in the mid 1990s when US weapons experts visited the power station and realized just how much Pu and U was stored there.

Washington Post: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization formed in 1949 as a military alliance among the US, Canada, and 10 northern and western European countries. Its raison d'être: mutual defense against the Soviet Union. The alliance now comprises 28 countries, including all three Baltic states, which used to belong to the Soviet Union, and Turkey, which borders Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The Washington Post's Karen DeYoung and Edward Cody review the new threats that NATO faces as its leaders convene in Lisbon, Portugal, to finalize a new overarching strategy. Russia's president, Dmitry Medvedev, will also attend.

New Scientist: "What started out as a science outreach project for NASA is now a Hollywood movie, with voices provided by stars such as William Shatner, Chris Pine, Samuel L. Jackson, and Amanda Peet," writes Jo Marchant for New Scientist. Written and directed by Harry Kloor, Quantum Quest: A Cassini Space Odyssey is a three-dimensional animated science-fiction film that centers on the Cassini–Huygens mission to Saturn and incorporates various physics principles into its plot. Astronaut Neil Armstrong, who is among the star-studded cast providing voice work, agreed to participate because he "liked the concept and the science in the movie," according to Kloor.

New York Times: The new so-called smart electric meter that utility companies around the US have been installing on private homes is meeting with significant opposition. Designed to replace the old analog ones, the new meters use digital technology and computer networking to transmit real-time data. Ideally, power companies will be able to better allocate power during times of the day when demand is high, and customers will receive a much more detailed report of how much electricity they are using. However, many people have been complaining that the meters are inaccurate, overcharge, and are reminiscent of Big Brother, writes Tom Zeller Jr for the New York Times.

Tehran Times: Iran's government-owned English-language paper, the Tehran Times, reports today on a recent ceremony to honor Alenush Terian on her 90th birthday. In 1964, Terian became Iran's first female physics professor. Two years later she helped to found Tehran University's solar observatory.

New York Times: To reach a storage facility in northern Germany, 123 tons of German nuclear waste that had been reprocessed in France had to cross Germany by train. Four thousand protesters, including tractor-driving farmers, blocked the route, delaying the train by three days. As the New York Times's Michael Slackman writes, the train's eventual arrival on Monday has not settled the debate within Germany about what to do with the waste from the country's 17 nuclear power stations or, more fundamentally, whether the country should have any nuclear power stations at all.

Nature: Writing in today's issue of Nature, tropical forest expert Simon Lewis of the University of Leeds in the UK exhorts his fellow climate scientists to be more assertive in rebutting inaccurate, misleading, or otherwise bad reporting on climate change. Lewis begins his opinion piece as follows:

When science hits the news, researchers often moan about the quality of the coverage. A sharp reminder of the issue rolls round this month—the anniversary of the global media frenzy over the release of e-mails from climate researchers at the University of East Anglia, UK. So what should scientists do when reporting quality falls off a cliff? Earlier this year, I was seriously misrepresented by a newspaper and thrown into a political storm. Rather than take it lying down, I set the record straight. It has been an odd journey, and I think there are lessons for how we scientists should deal with the media.

New Scientist: The International System of Units (SI), established in 1960 at a conference in Paris, set an international standard for core units of measure, such as the kilogram, meter, and second. The system was developed to improve accuracy and standardization around the world. On the 50th anniversary of the system’s adoption, New Scientist’s Alison George conducts a brief interview with Brian Bowsher, head of the UK’s measurement standards laboratory, the National Physical Laboratory.

Washington Post: The first annual USA Science and Engineering Festival drew a large crowd to Washington, DC, over the weekend. About 1 million people visited the more than 1500 free, interactive exhibits during the grand finale expo on 23–24 October, according to Leslie Tamura of the Washington Post. The expo, hosted by Lockheed Martin, was put together by 850 science organizations, which included professional science and engineering societies, universities, and federal laboratories. In Saturday's well-attended presentation by Dr. Molecule (see image below) of the Bloomfield Science Museum Jerusalem, children participated in experiments that demonstrated chemical reactions and physical forces.

Photonics.com: American artist Josef Kristofoletti has created a three-story-tall mural of the ATLAS particle detector at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The mural, which is one-third the size of the actual detector, is located aboveground at the ATLAS experiment site, while ATLAS itself is in a cavern 100 meters below. The artist was inspired to produce the large work when he visited the detector; he was invited there by ATLAS collaboration members who had seen his smaller painting of it. “We were thrilled to learn that ATLAS and particle physics had found their way into popular art,” said Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory physicist Michael Barnett, an ATLAS outreach coordinator. Because CERN and the LHC have attracted considerable interest from the artistic community over the years, the laboratory is developing an artist-in-residence program.

Science: What kind of science makes the best dance? asked Science magazine, which sponsored the 2010 "Dance Your PhD" contest. This year’s winner was chemistry: “Selection of a DNA Aptamer for Homocysteine Using SELEX,” presented by chemistry PhD candidate Maureen McKeague and fellow students at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Their presentation centered on a chemical technique called SELEX—systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment—which generates short segments of DNA and RNA called aptamers. The nucleic acids can be designed to stick to almost any target molecule; for McKeague’s PhD research, the target molecule is the amino acid homocysteine. Physicists can also check out the finalist in the physics category, Steven Lade’s “Directed Transport Without Net Bias in Physics and Biology.”

MSNBC.com: On Monday, President Obama hosted a science fair at the White House, at which 11 award-winning science projects were displayed. Obama is working to promote science and math education, because he is concerned that the US is being outpaced by other countries. The event kicked off a week of science-centric activity in Washington, DC, as part of the USA Science and Engineering Festival, which culminates 23–24 October on the National Mall. Obama also used the occasion to announce his upcoming 8 December appearance on the Discovery Channel program MythBusters, which uses science to uncover the truth behind urban legends.

2020 Science: In his blog, Andrew Maynard, director of the Risk Science Center at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, gives a favorable review of the collection of essays Science and the Media, published in August by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The book’s preface summarizes its content: “The authors look at the role the media play in boosting Americans’ scientific literacy and at how the new digital media are changing the coverage (and consumption) of science news. They discuss how inadequate press coverage combined with poor communication by scientists can lead to disastrous public policy decisions.” The publication is short, at 109 pages, and can be downloaded for free.

BBC: In August the InterAcademy Council, an umbrella organization comprising the national science academies of 15 nations, issued a report calling for reforms at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Now, as the BBC's Richard Black reports, the IPCC has issued a response at its meeting in Busan, South Korea. The panel will adopt recommended reforms on dealing with uncertainty in data, but will hand over consideration of other reforms, notably of IPCC management, to internal committees. Also at the Busan meeting, the panel's chair Rajendra Pachauri announced his intention to stay in his post through 2014, when the next IPCC report is due.

Telegraph: Virgin Galactic's SpaceShip Two, a rocket designed to carry tourists into space, made its first solo glide flight yesterday. Previously, the aircraft had only flown attached to the wing of its mother ship. On Sunday, SpaceShip Two and its two pilots were carried up to an altitude of 14 000 meters, released over the Mojave Desert, and flew for 11 minutes before landing at an airport runway. The "flight marks another key milestone towards opening the space frontier for private individuals, researchers, and explorers," said John Gedmark, executive director of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.

New Scientist: Scale is the theme of a recent art exhibit at Measure Gallery 825 in Los Angeles, curated by Harvard physicist Lisa Randall. "I wanted a theme where both art and science could participate and it wasn't just art representing science or science pretending to be art, but where we could think deeply about ideas that underlie both of them," Randall explains. In one of the pieces, “Measurements of Space in a Fractal Structured Vacuum,” artist Felicity Nove created paint pours reminiscent of supernova explosions and black holes on the Hubble website. The exhibit, Measure for Measure, on display 10 September through today, features seven artists and includes paintings, sculpture, and video and installation pieces.

Space.com: This week, 4–10 October, is the 11th annual World Space Week, which highlights the contributions of space science and technology to life on Earth. The start and end dates mark two key events in the history of space exploration: 4 October 1957, when Sputnik 1 launched, and 10 October 1967, the date the Outer Space Treaty, which formed the basis for international space law, went into effect. This year's theme is Mysteries of the Cosmos, and activities include a Google Lunar X Prize Summit on the Isle of Man; an astronomy festival in Marrakech, Morocco; and a star camp for high-school students in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.