Science: The international Committee on Space Research ( COSPAR) has established a "planetary protection" policy that involves not contaminating other worlds in a way that would jeopardize the conduct of future scientific investigations. As a signatory to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, the US is required by article IX to avoid "harmful contamination" of the other worlds of the solar system. However, further revisions to the policy are needed.
Related Links
How to avoid contaminating planetary neighbors NPR
NPR: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently said, "If you want to know the agenda for this new Congress, remember four words: science, science, science and science." Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) and Maria Zuber of MIT discuss what that might mean for science investment today.
The Independent: An emergency "Plan B" using the latest technology is needed to save the world from dangerous climate change, according to a poll of leading scientists carried out by The Independent. The collective international failure to curb the growing emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has meant that an alternative to merely curbing emissions may become necessary.
The plan would involve highly controversial proposals to lower global temperatures artificially through daringly ambitious schemes that either reduce sunlight levels by man-made means or take CO2 out of the air. This "geoengineering" approach – including schemes such as fertilising the oceans with iron to stimulate algal blooms – would have been dismissed as a distraction a few years ago but is now being seen by 54% of the scientists they surveyed as a viable emergency backup plan that could save the planet from the worst effects of climate change, at least until deep cuts are made in CO2 emissions.
NatureNews: Scientists at the Institute of Geophysics in Paris (IPGP) have been accused of acting as editors for dozens of papers by IPGP colleagues published from 1992 to 2008 in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters while they were members of the editorial board. The allegations follow a joint investigation by science journalists at the French newspapers Le Monde and Libération.
Science: Fallout from atomic bomb testing is helping to solve crimes and address some of the most controversial questions in biology
New York TImes: A new book says Moscow acquired the secret of the hydrogen bomb not from its own scientists but from an atomic spy at the Los Alamos weapons lab in New Mexico. Historians call its case sketchy but worthy of investigation, saying the book, “The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and its Proliferation,” by Thomas C. Reed and Danny B. Stillman, adds to a growing number of riddles about who invented the Soviet H-bomb a half century ago.
Related Physics Today Article
The Chinese nuclear tests, 1964–1996 by Thomas C. Reed
ScienceNOW: As if people living in the world's major earthquake zones don't have enough to worry about, a new analysis of two of the biggest quakes of the past century reveals a sharp spike in volcanic eruptions after the events, sometimes in volcanoes located hundreds of kilometers from the epicenters. The researchers are quick to point out that not all large earthquakes trigger eruptions, but the work does suggest that in areas where both earthquakes and volcanoes are common, such as in Indonesia, increased volcanic activity could be looming in the wake of big temblors.
Science: In 2006, Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev proclaimed that Kazakhstan would advance from the world's 56th most economically competitive nation to the ranks of the top 50 within a decade (1, 2). Science and technology were to be the driving force. But now, this arid country the size of Western Europe with a population of only 15.2 million has fallen to 66th (3).
Nature News: Oversimplifying the effect of the space race on US science funding could lead scientists down the wrong path, says David Goldston.
Nature News: The credibility of the European Commission's initiative to promote research collaborations between academia and industry is under threat because universities cannot afford to take part.
Nature News: European ministers commit €10 billion to space missions, Earth monitoring, and new facilities.
New York Times: Two new books by three atomic insiders hold out hope that nuclear proliferation will occur slowly and few countries if any will join the nuclear weapons club, assuming that determined global action and vigilance at the international level occurs. The books are “ The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and its Proliferation” by Thomas C. Reed and and Danny B. Stillman, and “ The Bomb: A New History" by Stephen M. Younger. The authors shatter myths, throw light on the hidden dynamics of nuclear proliferation and suggest new ways to reduce the threat says New York Times editor William J. Broad.
Neither book endorses J. Robert Oppenheimer’s view that bombs are relatively easy to make. Both document national paths to acquiring nuclear weapons that have been rocky and dependent on the willingness of spies and politicians to divulge state secret
Thomas C. Reed wrote for Physics Today in September that includes some material from his book.
Related Physics Today Article
The Chinese nuclear tests, 1964–1996
Nature News: A new generation of lithium-ion batteries, coupled with rising oil prices and the need to address climate change, has sparked a global race to electrify transportation. Jeff Tollefson investigates.
Science: Say you're a physicist with a strong mathematical background, eager for intellectual stimulation and pining for some challenging problems to solve. You could seek a faculty gig and spend the next couple of decades developing a theory of everything. Or you could become a "quant" (short for "quantitative analyst") and use advanced mathematics to help move mountains--of cash--through the world's financial systems.
The Guardian: Should science communicators restrict themselves in their public utterances to their own subject, or are they right to join in with other social commentators in the public arena to opine on wider societal issues such as ethics or faith?
Science: Chinese researchers visiting the US for workshops and conferences are being snared by a recent slowdown in the processing of US visas for foreign scientists says Richard Stone.
Procedures instituted after the 11 September 2001 attacks require the US Department of Homeland Security, CIA, FBI, and other agencies to vet most scientists from countries whose citizens must obtain visas to enter the United States. In 2003, visa delays prompted scientific societies to warn of an erosion of U.S. competitiveness if top foreign talent were to eschew travel to the United States. By last year, U.S. security agencies had managed to whittle average visa-processing time for scientists from 7 weeks to 3 weeks.
It has since climbed back up to 8 weeks. "We are quite concerned about the possibility of seeing all the ground we made lost," says Amy Scott, assistant vice president for federal relations at the Association of American Universities in Washington, D.C.
Washington Post: James McCarthy, a Harvard University oceanographer who is president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, earlier this week sharply criticized recent cases of Bush administration political appointees gaining permanent federal jobs with responsibility for making or administering scientific policies, saying the result would be "to leave wreckage behind."
"It's ludicrous to have people who do not have a scientific background, who are not trained and skilled in the ways of science, make decisions that involve resources, that involve facilities in the scientific infrastructure," said McCarthy. "You'd just like to think people have more respect for the institution of government than to leave wreckage behind with these appointments."
His comments came as several new examples surfaced of political appointees gaining coveted, high-level civil service positions as the administration winds down. The White House has said repeatedly that all gained their new posts in an open, competitive process, but congressional Democrats and others questioned why political appointees had won out over qualified federal career employees.
Guardian.co.uk: The long-lost skeleton of Nicolaus Copernicus – the 16th-century astronomer who transformed our understanding of the solar system – has been found, Polish researchers have confirmed.
Science: According to the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development's publication Main Science and Technology Indicators 2008, China's $87 billion R&D expenditure in 2006, in purchasing power parity dollars, was higher than all countries except the United States and Japan, and only the United States has more researchers--1,387,882 compared with China's 1,223,756. Officials with China's Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) like to point out that China is now second only to the United States in the number of publications in international journals.
But in many ways, China punches below its weight in science.
Physicist and former president of Chinese Academy of Sciences Zhou Guangzhao says in China, "success is often scored by quantity rather than quality." For that reason, Zhou contends, most Chinese scientists are content to follow well-trodden paths and churn out routine papers rather than strive for fundamental breakthroughs. Deference to status also makes it difficult for junior researchers to challenge academicians or science mandarins. That wasn't so in the 1950s and 1960s, when Zhou was working on China's atomic bomb project; then, he says, scientists treated one another as equals and worked collectively toward the goal of strengthening China. These days, many scientists say, there is greater freedom in society, but a market economy has made private interests the driving force of science, supplanting the idealism that inspired earlier generations of researchers.
Science: As the oil industry gears up for the ongoing offshore-oil boom, scientists who study the sea floor say competition for scarce drilling resources is leaving them high and dry. "Funding goes down, oil goes up," laments paleoceanographer Henk Brinkhuis of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Facing soaring costs and lengthening delays, the United States component of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP)--the current phase of the cooperative international investigation beneath the sea floor--has been literally stuck in dry dock, leading to an unprecedented 3-year hiatus in U.S. drilling. Japanese and European components of IODP are not faring much better. "I am very concerned about the long-term future of IODP," says marine geologist Craig Fulthorpe of the University of Texas, Austin.
McClatchy: After the White House intervened, the Environmental Protection Agency last week weakened a rule on airborne lead standards at the last minute so that fewer polluters would have their emissions monitored.
The EPA on Oct. 16 announced that it would dramatically reduce the highest acceptable amount of airborne lead from 1.5 micrograms of lead per cubic meter to 0.15 microgram. It was the first revision of the standard since EPA set it 30 years ago.
However, a close look at documents publicly available, including e-mails from the EPA to the White House Office of Management and Budget, reveal that the OMB objected to the way the EPA had determined which lead-emitting battery recycling plants and other facilities would have to be monitored.
Physics Today: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2008 with one half to Yoichiro Nambu Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago, IL, USA "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics" and the other half jointly to Makoto Kobayashi, High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Tsukuba, Japan
and Toshihide Maskawa, Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), Kyoto University, Japan
"for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature".
This news story will be updated throughout the day.
At a press conference this morning 87-year-old Nambu said he was awakened by a telephone call from the academy. "I was surprised and honored. I didn't expect it. I've been told for many years that I was on the list (to get the award)," he said. "I had almost given up."
Nambu moved to the United States from Japan in 1952 and has worked at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, where he has worked for 40 years.
In Japan, 64-year-old Kobayashi at his own press conference said "It's an honor to receive the prize for my work from long time ago."
In a separate news conference at his university, 68-year-old Maskawa said, "As a scientist, I'm not thrilled by the prize."
"I was happier when our findings were acknowledged [by the community] around 2002. The Nobel prize is a rather mundane thing."
In a review of Jeremy Bernstein's "The Tenth Dimension: An Informal History of High Energy Physics" (August 1989, page 65) Robert March recommends the book for giving Makoto "Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa the recognition they deserve, but rarely get, for anticipating the discovery of the third generation in their model of CP violation". After today that recognition will be widely known.
Passion for symmetry
The fact that our world does not behave perfectly symmetrically is due to deviations from symmetry at the microscopic level.
As early as 1960, Yoichiro Nambu formulated his mathematical description of spontaneous broken symmetry in elementary particle physics. Spontaneous broken symmetry conceals nature’s order under an apparently jumbled surface. It has proved to be extremely useful, and Nambu’s theories permeate the standard model of elementary particle physics. The model unifies the smallest building blocks of all matter and three of nature’s four forces in one single theory.
The spontaneous broken symmetries that Nambu studied differ from the broken symmetries described by Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa. These spontaneous occurrences seem to have existed in nature since the very beginning of the universe and came as a complete surprise when they first appeared in particle experiments in 1964. It is only in recent years that scientists have come to fully confirm the explanations that Kobayashi and Maskawa made in 1972. It is for this work that they are now awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. They explained broken symmetry within the framework of the Standard Model, but required that the Model be extended to three families of quarks. These predicted, hypothetical new quarks have recently appeared in physics experiments. As late as 2001, the two particle detectors BaBar at Stanford, USA and Belle at Tsukuba, Japan, both detected broken symmetries independently of each other. The results were exactly as Kobayashi and Maskawa had predicted almost three decades earlier.
A hitherto unexplained broken symmetry of the same kind lies behind the very origin of the cosmos in the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago. If equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created, they ought to have annihilated each other. But this did not happen, there was a tiny deviation of one extra particle of matter for every 10 billion antimatter particles. It is this broken symmetry that seems to have caused our cosmos to survive.
Related Physics Today Articles
The Asymmetry Between Matter and Antimatter February 2003, page 30
Novel B Factories Close in on the Violation of CP Symmetry May 2001, page 17
At Last We Have an Undisputed Observation of `Direct' CP Violation in Kaon Decay May 1999, page 17
Two Experiments Observe Explicit Violation of Time-Reversal Symmetry February 1999, page 72
Broken Symmetry: Selected Papers of Y. Nambu (Review) October 1996, page 72
The Tenth Dimension: An Informal History of High Energy Physics (Review) August 1989, page 65
Pions to Quarks: Particle Physics in the 1950s November 1988, page 56
Flavor SU(3) Symmetries in Particle Physics April 1988, page 29
CERN Experiment Clarifies Origin of CP Symmetry Violation October 1988, page 17
Neutral B Mesons Show Surprisingly Large Flavor Mixing August 1987, page 17
Related News Stories
American, 2 Japanese share Nobel Prize in Physics USA Today
Chicago Professor Shares In Nobel Prize PhysicsNPR
NobelPrize.org
Slate Magazine: The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg once summed up his feeling about people who saw evidence of the divine in the laws of physics like so: "I don't know why they use words like 'designer' or 'God,' except perhaps as a form of protective coloration."
God was mostly off the table in recent weeks—except in His particle form—as the Large Hadron Collider revved up for a massive series of experiments in subatomic physics. But among science journalists, there was plenty of protective coloration of another variety. Much of the prose from the hundreds of stories heralding the event arced decidedly toward the purple.
The Guardian: Martin Rees responds to former UK science adviser David King's suggestion that the UK should cut back on space research and basic physics in order to focus on more immediate issues such as climate change. Such a shift in research would be misguided says Rees.
But it is mistaken to claim that global problems will be solved more quickly if only researchers would abandon their quest to understand the universe and knuckle down to work on an agenda of public or political concerns. These are not "either/or" options – indeed, there is a positive symbiosis between them.
We need basic, fundamental research for a whole raft of reasons. It is the bedrock on which technology is based. But its applications can't be foreseen, even by the pioneers who open up new fields – not even by people of the calibre of great pioneers like Faraday or Rutherford.
The Guardian: Four hundred years after a Dutch spectacle maker laid claim to inventing the world's first telescope, documents have emerged suggesting a Spaniard may have got there first.
Historians generally credit Hans Lipperhey, who lived in the coastal town of Middelburg, with creating the first telescope, which he demonstrated to the Hague government on September 25 1608. But according to a recently discovered will, a brass-decorated telescope was among objects bequeathed by a Spaniard, Don Pedro de Carolona, to his widow in Barcelona in 1593.
Science: Last week, the Royal Society issued a report that says the government implementation of science education reform is unscientific. The changes have come so fast, one after another, that it's impossible to know whether anything has worked or just added to the problem, the report says. Moreover, new measures on the horizon, such as a high school science "diploma," are being rushed in without appropriate testing, the Royal Society warns. Curriculum reform, it concludes, should be managed by fully independent bodies, not politicians with short-term interests. "We strongly felt [reform] should be taken away from immediate political gain so as to get a more measured response," says polymer scientist Julia Higgins of Imperial College London, chair of the working group that produced the report.
New York Times: Wind entrepreneur Peter Mandelstam had his eureka moment when he released how much power was associated with the Mid-Atlantic Bight. This coastal region running from Massachusetts to North Carolina contained up to 330,000 megawatts of average electrical capacity. This is, in other words, an amount of guaranteed, bankable power that was larger, in terms of energy equivalence, than the entire mid-Atlantic coast’s total energy demand — not just for electricity but for heating, for gasoline, for diesel and for natural gas. Indeed the wind off the mid-Atlantic represented a full third of the Department of Energy’s estimate of the total American offshore resource of 900,000 megawatts.
Building offshore turbines to exploit it however, would leave Mandelstam against the local power companies, who didn't want the competition, and holiday resorts who didn't want their coastline view spoiled with windmills in the distance. It would lead to millions of dollars spent fighting one of the most protracted political battles in Delaware history, and the proposal to build a 200-megawatt wind farm off the coast of Delaware.
Mark Svenvold looks at the politics behind wind power, why states are shaping the state of the national energy grid, and the need for federal regulation and subsidies for renewable energy.
The Daily Telegraph: The scientists behind the £4.4bn atom smasher had already received threatening emails and been besieged by telephone calls from worried members of the public concerned by speculation that the machine could trigger a black hole to swallow the earth, or earthquakes and tsunamis, despite endless reassurances to the contrary from the likes of Prof Stephen Hawking.
Now it has emerged that, as the first particles were circulating in the machine near Geneva, a Greek group had hacked into the facility and displayed a page with the headline "GST: Greek Security Team."
The people responsible signed off: "We are 2600 - dont mess with us. (sic)"
The website - cmsmon.cern.ch - can no longer be accessed by the public as a result of the attack.
Nature News: Nuclear engineer Rusi Taleyarkhan has been stripped of his named professorship at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, following the results of a misconduct inquiry into his bubble-fusion research.
Nature News: An Italian-led research group's closely held data have been outed by paparazzi physicists, who photographed conference slides and then used the data in their own publications.
For weeks, the physics community has been buzzing with the latest results on 'dark matter' from a European satellite mission known as PAMELA ( Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics). Team members have talked about their latest results at several recent conferences (see Nature 454, 808; 2008), but beyond a quick flash of a slide, the collaboration has not shared the data. Many high-profile journals, including Nature, have strict rules about authors publicizing data before publication.
It now seems that some physicists have taken matters into their own hands. At least two papers recently appeared on the preprint server arXiv.org showing representations of PAMELA's latest findings (M. Cirelli et al. http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3867; 2008, and L. Bergstrom et al. http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3725; 2008). Both have recreated data from photos taken of a PAMELA presentation on 20 August at the Identification of Dark Matter conference in Stockholm, Sweden.
New York Times: It’s easy to forget, 130 years after outdoor electric lighting first cast its glow through the night, that the sky is actually full of stars. But largely as a result of a remarkable partnership between science and business that took root in Tucson during the 1970s, an idea is gaining acceptance: that darker skies can be achieved with new products and technologies. Darker skies can generate real benefits not only for astronomers, but also for businesses from gas stations and parking lots to Nascar tracks.
The Washington Post: While people who study elections usually scrutinize individual voters, politicians, advocacy groups, issues, campaign contributors and volunteers, historian Allan Lichtman and geophysicist Vladimir Keilis-Borok, decided to think about an election the same way geophysicists regard earthquakes. Getting too close to the phenomenon -- the views of individual voters and campaigners -- is like trying to study an earthquake by analyzing every single molecule of rock and soil.
"The systems that generate elections and earthquakes are complex systems," said Keilis-Borok, who is now a professor of earth sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles. "They are not predictable by simple equations, but after coarse-graining -- averaging -- they become predictable."
In a paper in the International Journal of Forecasting, Lichtman predicted a political earthquake this November: The incumbent party will crumble, and Sen. Barack Obama will be elected president.
Various: Eight scientific organizations have called for Congress and the next president to almost double research investments in weather prediction, climate research and monitoring in order to protect the country from climate change and natural disasters.
The proposed plan, which was sent as a document to the presidential campaigns of John McCain and Barack Obama, would cost the nation about $9 billion above the current $10 billion already allotted for fiscal years 2010-2014.
The groups include the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union.
"With more than a quarter of the U.S. gross national product sensitive to weather and climate, these events substantially impact our national health, safety, economy, environment, transportation systems, and military readiness," the document states.
The document stressed the need for more research in five areas:
- Observations. Fully fund the Earth observing system from satellite and ground-based instruments as recommended by the National Research Council.
- Computing. Greatly increase the computer power available for weather and climate research, predictions and related applications.
- Research and Modeling. Support a broad fundamental and applied research program in Earth sciences and related fields to advance present understanding of weather and climate and their impacts on society.
- Societal Relevance. Support education, training and communication efforts to use the observations, models and application tools for the maximum benefit of society.
- Leadership and Management. Implement effective leadership, management and evaluation approaches to ensure that these investments are done in the best interest of the nation.
Related Links
Making Climate Forecasting More Useful New York Times
More funding urged for climate research USA Today
Advice to the New Administration and Congress: Actions to Make our Nation Resilient to Severe Weather and Climate Change (official site)
Wall Street Journal: In the garage of his house, Frank Sanns spends nights tinkering with one of his prized possessions: a working nuclear-fusion reactor.
Mr. Sanns, 51 years old, is part of a small subculture of gearheads, amateur physicists and science-fiction fans who are trying to build fusion reactors in their basements, backyards and home laboratories.
Called fusors and based on a 1960s design first developed by Philo T. Farnsworth, an inventor of television, the reactors are typically small steel spheres with wires and tubes sticking out and a glass window for looking inside. But they won't be powering homes anytime soon -- for now, fusors use far more energy than they produce.
USA Today: For decades, educators and employers have worried that too few Americans are preparing for careers in science. But there's evidence to support a new, broader concern in this election year: Ordinary Americans may not know enough about science to make informed decisions on key questions.
Physics Today: 2008 北京奥运
As thousands of competitors gather in Beijing, China, for the 2008 summer Olympics, many of them over the coming weeks will be either using scientific advancements to gain a perceived performance edge, such as a new high-tech swimsuit, or applying physics subconsciously, to sail, ride, or play baseball.
Over the years the way athletes conduct sport has changed. In 708 BC, athletes would carry weights in the ancient form of the long jump. The weights, made of stone or lead, improved the jumpers' performance, reports Steven K. Blau.
The recent Wimbledon and French Open tennis championships raised questions concerning the high-speed nature of the serves. Should drag be increased on the ball to slow the serves down? Or the tennis racket be made smaller to increase the skill required to play the game? Howard Brody from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia believes practice is more likely to win championships, not high-tech rackets, after attempting to design the perfect tennis racket. And Rod Cross takes a detailed look at ball bounce in his discussion ofthe physics of the game.
Although technology might not help tennis players, it will destroy the game of baseball, predicts Robert K. Adair from Yale University. Adair has spent years studying baseball and why aluminum bats should be banned from the game.
David E. H. Jones pondered some time ago the perplexing question of how does a bicycle keep its stability? The answer involves torsorial forces, although some centrifugal forces will be keeping the speed cyclists on the Olympic raised track.
NPR's Andrew Prince looks at research done at George Washington University on the mechanics of the swimming in creatures such as fish and dolphins, and how its been applied to Michael Phelps' success in the Olympic pool, with his use of the dolphin kick, the undulating, wavelike motion he makes underwater.
But air quality may prove to be the most significant factor in the athletes’ performance, and a risk to the spectators, despite the attempts by the Chinese government to reduce pollution by closing factories and banning cars. Richard Stone from Science magazine asks what happens after the games finish?
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A Little Extra Weight Goes a Long Way
How Would a Physicist Design a Tennis Racket?
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Various: The FBI has released details about its case against accused researcher Bruce Ivins, who killed himself last week after being told he would be prosecuted as the prime suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks. A number of websites have provided some analysis of the FBI's case. The Smoking Gun has collated the highlights to the prosecution's case. Meryl Nass, a noted anthrax researcher, writes on her blog Anthrax Vaccine that “What came out today was another pastiche of innuendo and circumstantial evidence, with an awful lot of holes.”
Nass raises the following main questions:
1. Ivins had just been immunized against anthrax. He was required to have yearly immunizations, and some anthrax scientists have chosen to be vaccinated every six months for safety, since the vaccine’s efficacy is weak — and Ivins had proven its weakness in several animal models. In his career he had probably received about 33 separate anthrax vaccinations.
2. Earlier in the week, anonymous officials at the FBI leaked to the press that the envelopes came from the specific post office he frequented. Today the affidavit states it is "reasonable to conclude" they were purchased in Maryland or Virginia.
3. Choosing a strain that would direct suspicion at Ivins. The perpetrator(s) were tremendously careful to leave no clues vis a vis the envelopes. For example, block lettering was used, which is the hardest to identify with handwriting analysis. Second, stamped envelopes were chosen to avoid using saliva. Third, there were no fingerprints on anything.
Why would the person(s) who took such care select an anthrax strain that would focus suspicion on himself? In 2001, strain analysis was possible. It had been discussed many times as a forensic tool for biowarfare, including in a paper Nass wrote in 1992, which Ivins had read, and in which Nass thanked him for his contributions.
4. Ivins was the “sole custodian” of the strain. But the strain was grown in 1997, and more than 100 people had access to it over that four year period. Having received a sample, or obtained it surreptitiously, they would be “custodians” of it too.
Nass also points out that the FBI report does not explain how the anthrax was weaponized, nor can explain how Ivins created it. The FBI also cannot explain how the letters were mailed from Princeton. "Either Ivins had an alibi or he didn't.... If Ivins cannot be placed in New Jersey on those dates, he is not the attacker, or he did not act alone," says Nass.
Update: 8/19/2008. The FBI release some of the evidence related to their investigation. NPR's David Kestenbaum provides some details of the case, along with New York Times reporters Eric Lichtblau and Nicholas Wade. Although some of the techniques have been reviewed, the research has yet to be independently verified by experts not associated to the case. Richard O. Spertzel, a retired microbiologist who led the United Nations’ biological weapons inspections of Iraq, told the New York Times that he remained skeptical of the bureau’s argument despite the new evidence. “It’s a pretty tenuous argument,” Spertzel said, adding that he questioned the bureau’s claim that the powder was less than military grade. Nass adds some more questions to the coverage
The Times: Britain's great seafaring tradition is to provide a unique insight into modern climate change, thanks to thousands of Royal Navy logbooks that have survived from the 17th century onwards.
“Ships’ officers recorded air pressure, wind strength, air and sea temperature and other weather conditions. From those records scientists can build a detailed picture of past weather and climate,” said Dr Sam Willis, a maritime historian and author who is affiliated with Exeter University’s Centre for Maritime Historical Studies.
New York Times: Thanks to their low fuel consumption, airships are enjoying renewed attention as an alternative in an era of high fuel prices. But while zeppelins inspire enormous loyalty among those who work on them and a sense of wonder among all who watch them soar, the financial returns have barely gotten off the ground. The New York Times' Nicholas Kulish visits Friedrichshafen, Germany whose zeppelin foundation builds airships and supports the local city.
The New York Times: "The Universe in Mirror: The Saga of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Visionaries Who Built It" is a breezy behind-the-scenes account.
USA Today: Morten Bo Madsen spends his work day crunching data on a laptop seated in front of a clear plastic-covered box about the size of a widescreen computer monitor that emits a startlingly bright blue light.
Madsen is one of the 150 scientists and engineers working on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander mission. The bright light keeps Madsen's internal clock in check, because Madsen is living on Mars time.
Mars' day is 40 minutes longer than Earth's, and the start of the Martian day is always changing with respect to Earth time, as a result of their respective orbital motions.
Living on a schedule that shifts forward by 40 minutes everyday can wreak havoc on the human body, creating an effect that is essentially like perpetual jet lag.
Washington Post: Colleagues and friends of Bruce E. Ivins, the vaccine specialist who committed suicide earlier this week after the FBI indicated they were going to indict him for the 2001 anthrax attacks remained convinced that Ivins was innocent: They contended that he had neither the motive nor the means to create the fine, lethal powder that was sent by mail to news outlets and congressional offices in the late summer and fall of 2001. Mindful of previous FBI mistakes in fingering others in the case, many are deeply skeptical that the bureau has gotten it right this time.
Update: 8/4/2008. The New York Times Scott Shane writes that most of the evidence against Ivins is circumstantial, and that the FBI was several weeks away from indicting the scientist. While genetic analysis had linked the anthrax letters to a supply of the deadly bacterium in Dr. Ivins’s laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., at least 10 people had access to the flask containing that anthrax, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly.
“What has bothered me is the unscientific, bumbling approach of our investigators,” said Rep Rush D. Holt (D-NJ),a physicist whose New Jersey district includes the contaminated Princeton mailbox.
Mr. Holt said in a recent interview that his first doubts came after anthrax was found in his Congressional office in October 2001 but investigators never returned to conduct systematic testing to trace the path of the anthrax spores.
After that, he said, when contamination at a New Jersey postal processing center indicated that the letters had been mailed on one of a limited number of routes, it took investigators seven months to test several hundred mailboxes and identify the source.
“Within two days they could have dispatched 50 people to wipe all those mailboxes,” Holt said. He wrote to Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, on Friday to ask that he testify to Congress about the investigation as soon as it is closed.
Meryl Nass, a doctor with some background in anthrax, queries whether Ivins could have produced the dry form of anthrax used in the attacks.
Various: Microbiologist Bruce E. Ivins, 62, died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital in Maryland. He was believed to have taken a massive dose of prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine after the FBI told him that he was going to be indicted as part of the investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks.
According to the Associated Press, prosecutors were seeking the death penalty as part of the indictment.
Ivin's lawyer, Paul F. Kemp, who has represented Ivins for the past year, issued a statement asserting Ivins' innocence.
"For more than a year, we have been privileged to represent Dr. Bruce Ivins during the investigation of the anthrax deaths of September and October of 2001," Kemp said. "We assert his innocence in these killings, and would have established that at trial."
"The relentless pressure of accusation and innuendo takes its toll in different ways on different people, as has already been seen in this investigation. In Dr. Ivins' case, it led to his untimely death. We ask that the media respect the privacy of his family, and allow them to grieve."
Ivins worked for the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, at Fort Detrick in Maryland. Ivin's was an expertise on anthrax and has been called on by the FBI to analyze the anthrax spores that were sent through the mail to media organizations and politicians shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks. The anthrax letters killed 5 people and sickened 17.
In 2003 Ivins received the highest honor given to Defense Department civilian employees for helping solve technical problems in the manufacture of anthrax vaccine.
According to the LA Times, which broke the story, Ivins began showing signs of “serious strain” shortly after the government’s $5.8 million settlement with Steven J. Hatfill, who for many years, was the main suspect in the case, a fact that was leaked to the press and damaged his career.
After Ivins had expressed suicidal thoughts to a therapist he was seeing to treat depression, his access to sensitive work at the government labs was curtailed, and he was subsequently hospitalized for depression.
Ivins was released from the hospital on July 24, but he was facing the prospect of forced retirement, according to a colleague, who described him as “emotionally fractured” by the government scrutiny.
USA Today published a story in 2004 on Ivins and his casual nature nature in dealing with suspect anthrax contamination in a colleague's office.
In 2003, Physics Today published some of the research connected to the investigation.
Related Physics Today articles
Technical and Policy Issues of Counterterrorism--A Primer for Physicists May 2003
National Labs Focus on Tools against Terrorism in Wake of Airliner and Anthrax Attacks January 2002
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Anthrax suspect dies in apparent suicide LA Times
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Death Of Suspect In Anthrax Attacks Called Suicide NPR
Nature News: Italian scientists are worried that a shake-up of the nation’s space agency will put commercial and defence interests ahead of research.
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is in the process of replacing the president of the Italian Space Agency. He is removing the agency’s current head, astrophysicist Giovanni Bignami, and installing business executive Enrico Saggese, who heads the space division at Finmeccanica, Italy’s largest aerospace firm.
Nature News: Can the Chinese government meet its ambitious targets on space, the environment, research, energy and health? David Cyranoski takes a look at China today and what it hopes to be tomorrow.
Nature: Could the end of US world dominance over research mark the passing of national science giants, ask J. Rogers Hollingsworth, Karl H. Müller and Ellen Jane Hollingsworth.
Xinhua: Chinese mainland and China's Taiwan won five gold medals each, finishing first at the 39th International Physics Olympiad (IPhO) that ended in Vietnam's Hanoi capital on Monday.
Nature News: Many of the research projects launched as part of the International Polar Year (IPY), which runs from March 2007 to March 2009, are under threat because of the steep rise in marine-fuel costs. Hundreds of Arctic and Antarctic scientists face uncertainty as polar science programmes worldwide are curtailed, postponed or cancelled.
Various: The final report into the allegations of scientific miscount concerning Purdue University nuclear engineering professor Rusi Taleyarkhan has been released. Taleyarkhan had published papers in which he reported seeing evidence of nuclear fusion in the collapse of tiny bubbles in a liquid subjected to ultrasonic excitation in a process called sonoluminance. This has not been replicated by other researchers. The allegations, which were issued in 2006, and conclusions are summarized in the local newspaper, the Journal and Courier.
Of the nine specific allegations, two were found to comprise scientific misconduct. The committee "could not find any other instances of scientists being able to replicate Taleyarkhan's results without Taleyarkhan having direct involvement with the experiments," but notes that this comes "just short of questioning whether Taleyarkhan's results were fraudulent."
Related Links
Details of what Purdue's investigation found Journal and Courier
The Full Purdue Report (pdf)
Purdue press release
The Guardian: After a 15-month inquiry the UK's media regulator Ofcom will rule next week that the UK television broadcaster Channel 4 misrepresented some of the world's leading climate scientists in a controversial documentary that claimed global warming was a conspiracy and a fraud. Ofcom is expected to censure the network over its treatment of some scientists in the programme, The Great Global Warming Swindle.
But it is understood that Channel 4 will still claim victory because the ultimate verdict on a separate complaint about accuracy, which contained 131 specific points and ran to 270 pages, will find that it did not breach the regulator's broadcasting code and did not materially mislead viewers.
Rockford Register Star: When Arnold Feldman graduated with a bachelor's degree in physics from Penn State University in January 1944, he was ready for violence.
"I was all hot to join the Army and kill Hitler personally," the 84-year-old Peoria resident said. "My professor said, 'No you don't. There's something more important.' That was a bit of an exaggeration. My contribution to the bomb project was not very much."
New York Times: The United States may be synonymous with the high-tech revolution, but it is in danger of losing its high-tech edge, according to Cybercities 2008, a report released Tuesday by AeA, a technology industry trade association.
Nature News: The UK government has invested heavily in science. Now it's looking for a return, and some worry that the research councils are being pressured to deliver, possibly at the expense of 'blue skies' research. Geoff Brumfiel looks at the changing landscape of science funding in Britain.
Physics Today: Global competition for scientists and engineers (S&Es) is rising as their role in economic development is increasingly recognized. Many countries are looking to S&Es from overseas to address skills gaps: in February 2008 introduction of new immigration laws favouring some categories of skilled migrant began in the UK.
The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) recently looked at the causes and impacts of migration of S&Es, focusing on the impact of the developing world. According to POST many S&Es leave their countries due to low wages, lack of career development, and because of a lack of research funding. There is a net flow of S&Es from developing countries to developed countries.
The net influx is allowing UK universities to continue teaching and conducting research in fields such as chemistry, physics and mathematics, where staff faculty numbers have been falling.
Although India and China lose a high number of S&Es to developed countries, it is a small percentage of the overall skilled population (5%). Countries in sub-Saharan Africa such as Gambia have 60% of their S&E workforce abroad, leading too a significant effect on their education and technology base.
Related Link
International Migration of Scientists and Engineers
The Times: The Home Office has been investigating the use of high-tech pain rays against mobs as an alternative to the water cannon, according to a report by its Scientific Development Branch due to be published next month.
The so-called active denial system (ADS) projects microwave-like radiation for distances of more than 500 yards, creating an excruciating, full-body burning sensation in anyone caught in its beam. The millimetre-wave rays penetrate skin to a depth of about 1/64in but cause no permanent damage, according to Raytheon, the system’s US-based maker.
Wired.com: The U.S. military's Missile Defense Agency signed a $97 million contract with a Kremlin-connected nonprofit, to help secure Russia's aid in anti-missile projects. Pentagon higher-ups ultimately quashed the deal between the agency and International Exchange Group, or IEG, for "facilitating" Russian "cooperation" on target missiles and early-warning radars. But the 2004 agreement shows the strength of the connections between the Defense Department, IEG and former Congressman Curt Weldon, now under investigation by the FBI. Earlier this week, news emerged that the wife of one of Weldon's staffers was reportedly paid money by IEG for work never performed.
USA Today: Convinced that climate change is the biggest challenge people face in the 21st century, Sally Ride, the first american woman in space is on a mission to keep middle school students, particularly girls, interested in science.
The Times: India and China are taking their rivalry into orbit, with Delhi determined to catch up with Beijing in what is starting to look like an Asian version of the Cold War “space sace”.
General Deepak Kapoor, India’s Chief of Army Staff, has spoken publicly for the first time of his fears about China’s military space programme and the need for India to accelerate its own.
“The Chinese space programme is expanding at an exponentially rapid pace in both offensive and defensive content,” he told a conference attended by India’s military top brass this week. “The Indian Army’s agenda for exploitation of space will have to evolve dynamically. It should be our endeavour to optimise space applications for military purposes.”
Science: A bill passed overwhelmingly by the Louisiana state legislature and expected to become law as early as next week marks the latest attack in the United States on the teaching of evolution and mainstream scientific thought on global warming and other topics.
Slate.com: Science traffics in the great unknowns, admitting that it has far more to learn than it has to teach. That hasn't stopped some from attempting to enlist it in the defense of religion. The pope puts out an encyclical trying to split the difference between evolution and the Book of Genesis. Intelligent design makes a mockery of both the method of induction and metaphysics. And scientists who use deistic language to describe the infinite mysteries of the cosmos are made out to be water-carriers for ancient dogmas—perhaps none more so than Albert Einstein. He's been a genius well worth stealing. The nimbus-domed father of relativity was, throughout most of the 20th century, held up as the most impressive example of a rationalist who left the door open a crack for the divine presence.
The New York Review of Books: Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape says Harvard University librarian Robert Darnton? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google?
...How to make sense of it all? I have no answer to that problem, but I can suggest an approach to it: look at the history of the ways information has been communicated. Simplifying things radically, you could say that there have been four fundamental changes in information technology since humans learned to speak.
Somewhere, around 4000 BC, humans learned to write.
The history of books led to a second technological shift when the codex replaced the scroll sometime soon after the beginning of the Christian era.
The codex, in turn, was transformed by the invention of printing with movable type in the 1450s.
The fourth great change, electronic communication, took place yesterday, or the day before, depending on how you measure it.
Each change in the technology has transformed the information landscape, and the speed-up has continued at such a rate as to seem both unstoppable and incomprehensible.
Says Darnton: long live Google, but don't count on it living long enough to replace that venerable building with the Corinthian columns. As a citadel of learning and as a platform for adventure on the Internet, the research library still deserves to stand at the center of the campus, preserving the past and accumulating energy for the future [From The Library in the New Age - The New York Review of Books]
New Scientist: In 1957, the Soviet Union caught the US completely off-guard. Its military launched Sputnik – the world's first artificial satellite – heralding the dawn of the space age. President Eisenhower's response was to create the Advance Research Projects Agency (ARPA) with a clear mission: "prevent technological surprise". Eisenhower hoped that the agency would produce revolutionary technologies and thus guarantee that never again would the US military be caught with its technological trousers down. Now in its 50th year, the Defence Advance Research Projects Agency has an impressive list of accomplishments behind it.
Science: On 25 April, officials at the particle physics lab submitted their final plans for the layoffs to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for approval. About 140 scientists, engineers, technicians, and other staff will receive pink slips in a 3-day process that could begin as early as next week. Roughly 60 more employees have accepted retirement or left because their term positions were not renewed. "We have to do what we have to do to ensure the health of the institution," says Fermilab Director Piermaria Oddone. "I feel terrible about it. … There is no choice."
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OSTA Bridges: Norman P. Neureiter reminisces over his years working in science and technology sectors, and the impact government policies have on research and development. He ends with:
The US is admired throughout the world – even in the most hostile countries – for its science and technology. Much of our current leadership position has come from scientists born outside the US; and as the international science community continues to grow around the world and in many countries, and the interest in science and engineering careers among US students declines, it is increasingly important that we maintain close cooperative ties with those international communities and continue to attract the best and the brightest from around the world. The US Government must do everything possible to facilitate such cooperative relationships – with appropriate funding, creative initiatives, international leadership, more student exchanges, and new visa and export control systems that truly protect our vital security interests while maintaining our great national legacy of openness and freedom of inquiry. For a long time the US has been the shining scientific city on the hill for much of the world. We need to make sure that the light of US science and technology continues to shine
The Gazette: Courtney Stadd the former NASA executive and Bethesda-based businessman has created a privately funded team working on an unmanned robotic spaceship to head back to the Moon.
His company, Quantum3 Ventures — which Stadd founded in January along with space industry veterans Paul Carliner of Washington, D.C., and Liam Sarsfield of Deale — is one of 10 entrants from as far away as Romania and Italy competing for the Google Lunar X Prize.
The competition is sponsored by the Mountain View, Calif., search engine giant Google, and the X Prize Foundation, a Santa Monica, Calif., nonprofit institute that wants to ‘‘create radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity.”
To collect the prize money, a team has to be first to land a robot on the moon that travels at least 500 meters and transmits images and other data back to Earth.
The Guardian: "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." So said Albert Einstein, and his famous aphorism has been the source of endless debate between believers and non-believers wanting to claim the greatest scientist of the 20th century as their own. A little known letter written by him, however, may help to settle the argument - or at least provoke further controversy about his views. Auctioned earlier today in London for 170,000 pounds after being in a private collection for more than 50 years, the document leaves no doubt that the theoretical physicist was no supporter of religious beliefs, which he regarded as "childish superstitions".
The London Times: Stephen Hawking, who has devoted his career to finding the origins of the universe, is to begin a new search – for Africa’s answer to Einstein. Despite suffering from motor neurone disease which has left him almost completely paralysed, Hawking, 66, has made the journey to South Africa to launch the project earlier this week. Some of the world’s leading high-tech entrepreneurs and scientists have backed the £75m plan to create Africa’s first postgraduate centres for advanced maths and physics, after the British government declined to provide funding. Hawking will be joined by eminent physicists and mathematicians including two Nobel laureates in physics, David Gross and George Smoot, and Michael Griffin, the head of Nasa. Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s education minister, will also speak. “The world of science needs Africa’s brilliant talents and I look forward to meeting prospective young Einsteins from Africa,” said Hawking.
New Scientist: Scientists have invited the public to trawl high-resolution images for signs of NASA's Mars Polar Lander, which went silent on arrival at Mars in 1999. Finding the wreckage might explain why the mission failed
newsobserver.com: Daniel Suson has a doctorate in astrophysics and has worked on the superconducting super collider and a coming NASA probe. Now he's heading back to school to take on an even trickier task -- getting elected to public office. He is among a growing number of scientists who feel slighted and abused in the public debate in recent years and are mobilizing to inject "evidence-based decision making" into public policy. Today, Suson, dean of engineering, mathematics and science at Purdue University Calumet, will join more than 70 other scientists, engineers and students at a hotel at Georgetown University for a crash course on elective politics.
London Review of Books: John Lanchester, a contributing editor at the London Review of Books reviews a series a books on global warming and ends his review with the following paragraphs:
The remarkable thing is that most of the things we need to do to prevent climate change are clear in their outline, even though one can argue over details. We need to insulate our houses, on a massive scale; find an effective form of taxing the output of carbon (rather than just giving tradeable credits to the largest polluters, which is what the EU did – a policy that amounted to a 30 billion euro grant to the continent’s biggest polluters); spend a fortune on both building and researching renewable energy and DC power; spend another fortune on nuclear power; double or treble our spending on public transport; do everything possible to curb the growth of air travel; and investigate what we need to do to defend ourselves if the sea rises, or if food imports collapse. If we do that we may find that we develop the technologies that China and India will need. If we can show that it is possible to cut carbon output dramatically without trashing our economy – well, that might be the single most important thing we could do, far outweighing the actual impact of our emission reductions.
We know all this, but whether any of it will actually happen is a different question. It is easy for politicians to stick wind turbines on their houses and ride bicycles, but effective action on climate change is about to require doing things that are not popular. In his eponymous report, Nicholas Stern has argued that it would cost about 1 per cent of global GDP now to prevent a loss of 5 per cent of global GDP in the future. The calculation is tweaked to make the cost now sound manageably small – but it is not yet clear whether Western electorates are willing to pay it. One per cent of global GDP is 600 billion dollars, most of which would be paid by the developed world. The idea is that by paying it now we would be keeping the world’s economy on track so that by 2050 the developed world would be 200 per cent richer and the developing world 400 per cent, while our emissions decline by 60 to 90 per cent and theirs increase by 25 to 50. (One problem is that 17 per cent of that growth in developing world emissions has already been used up.) The promised economic growth is jam tomorrow; we would be paying for it today, in the form of increased taxes and lost jobs. These things are all real to voters in ways that climate change perhaps is not. Are people going to give things up in the present in order to prevent things that computer models tell them are going to happen in 25 years’ time? If they – we – aren’t, then we’re heading for breeding pairs, and camels in the Arctic.
Science: Last October, the American TV network CBS premiered the now popular sitcom, The Big Bang Theory. Centering on two male physics postdocs and the blonde girl who moves in next door, The Big Bang Theory follows the sitcom formula of placing quirky, exaggerated characters in situations both odd and mundane.
The Big Bang Theory is the first time a prime-time comedy has taken science this seriously--partly in thanks to experimental particle physicist David Saltzberg of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Freelancer Karen Heyman recently spoke with Saltzberg and one of the show's creators Bill Prady for Science magazine, and paid a visit to the set of The Big Bang Theory, to learn how cutting-edge research gets injected into the show.
Physics Today: The European Space Agency has released images of Cyclone Nargis making its way across the Bay of Bengal just south of Myanmar on 1 May 2008.
 The cyclone hit the coastal region and ripped through the heart of Myanmar on Saturday, devastating the country. The picture (right) is from the Envisat's Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument working in Reduced Resolution mode to deliver a spatial resolution of 1200 meters.
Under an international charter founded by ESA, the French space agency (CNES) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) eight years ago, the agencies provide satellite data free of charge to those affected by disasters anywhere in the world. On 4 May, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) asked for support.
With inundated areas typically visible from space, Earth Observation (EO) is increasingly being used for flood response and mitigation. One of the biggest problems during flooding emergencies is obtaining an overall view of the phenomenon, with a clear idea of the extent of the flooded area.
These Envisat radar images above highlight the extent of flooding in the Irrawaddy delta caused by the cyclone Nargis that hit Myanmar on May 3, 2008, devastating the country. The left image, acquired on Feb. 5, 2007, shows the situation approximately one year ago. The black and dark areas in the image on the right, acquired on May 5, 2008, indicate areas potentially still flooded two days after the event. Envisat's Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar data are especially well suited for delivering information on floods, which are usually accompanied by rain and therefore cloudy conditions. Radar sensors can peer through clouds, rain or local darkness and are especially sensitive to moisture on the ground. Both images have a 75 m pixel grid on the ground and show an area approximately 100 km wide.
Science: In 2001, mathematical physicist Neil Turok went back for the first time in 25 years to his childhood home, South Africa, to visit his parents. Dismayed by the lack of opportunities for math graduates in Africa and motivated by his father, a former antiapartheid activist, the University of Cambridge researcher took action. Over the next 2 years, Turok had a derelict building near Cape Town renovated into a new institute, enrolled 29 math graduates from 11 African nations, and persuaded mathematician colleagues to teach there for 3-week shifts. "It's a very inspirational venture, … a real flagship project," says Britain's Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, who has visited the institute.
The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) continues to grow (see sidebar, p. 605), but Turok isn't stopping there. He's leading the effort to replicate it at 15 centers across the continent, each focusing on a different area of applied math, such as economics. "When people hear about AIMS, they get very excited," Turok says, "and people see the spark of something much, much bigger."
Related Physics Today article
Institute nurtures African math and science graduate students April 2008
Space.com: NASA has pushed back the planned launch of the final flight to overhaul the Hubble Space Telescope by up to five weeks due to external fuel tank delays, mission managers said Thursday. Space shuttle program manager John Shannon said that the additional time required to include post-Columbia safety improvements in two shuttle fuel tanks supporting the Hubble servicing mission have delayed the spaceflight to no earlier than late September. A seven-astronaut crew was slated to launch toward Hubble aboard NASA's shuttle Atlantis on Aug. 28. "We really cannot make that date with the external tank processing," Shannon told reporters in a briefing here at NASA's Johnson Space Center. "I really think it's a small price to pay, to tell you the truth, four to five weeks for all the improvements that we're getting on this tank."
Physics Today: Faster moving ships hit the whales, causing injury or death, say scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Yet for over a year the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs has blocked the National Marine Fisheries Service from issuing a rule based on scientific research that limits the speed of ships near US ports to protect the endangered right whale.
 According to documents obtained by the House of representative committee on oversight and government reform (OGR), the delay appears to be based on objections raised by Whitehouse officials and the Vice President's office. Under Executive order 12866, the OIRA is supposed to complete their review of rule changes within 90 days and can only extend the review period by an additional 30 days.
According to Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA), who recently sent a letter to the administration requesting an explanation, the Vice President's office is objecting to NOAA's research as the Vice President's staff "contends that we have no evidence that lowering the speeds of 'large ships' will actually make a difference."
In a memo obtained by the OGR committee NOAA rejected these objections, stating that both a statistical analysis of ship strike records and the peer-reviewed literature justified the final rule. NOAA reported that there is "no basis to overturn our previous conclusion that imposing a speed limit on large vessels would be beneficial to whales."
Waxman says that he questions "why White House economic advisors are apparently conducting their own research on right whales and why the Vice President's staff is challenging the conclusions of the government's scientific experts. The appearance is that the White House rejects the conclusions of its own scientists and peer-reviewed scientific studies because it does not like the policy implications of the data. This is not how the review process is supposed to work."
Nature News: A dozen of cosmology’s brightest minds, including British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, descended on the Cook’s Branch Conservancy in Montgomery County, Texas, last week to discuss the tricky problems of the early Universe. These physicists, most of whom are connected in some way to Hawking, either as collaborators or past graduate students at the University of Cambridge, UK, arrived for the invitation-only retreat, which, in its second year, has become one of the most exclusive — and pampered — workshops in physics. The 23-square-kilometre property is owned by George Mitchell, an 88-year-old developer and oilman worth US$3.2 billion. Late in life, Mitchell has cultivated a love for astrophysics, bestowing $50 million on Texas A&M University in College Station. “I am trying to see how our top universities can have as much influence in high-level physics as, say, Caltech and the University of California, Berkeley, or Harvard or Yale,” Mitchell explains. “And I am trying to see how we can get in on the act, because this state is big enough and wealthy enough to get it done.”
Chronicle of Higher Education: Two years ago, the National Academies sounded the alarm in a widely cited report, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” that America was slipping behind other countries in science and technology. On Tuesday leaders from academe and business met here to try to refocus Congress’s attention on the report’s many recommendations that require lawmakers’ action. One expected topic of discussion on Tuesday is a lobbying effort already under way to persuade Congress to increase federal spending for physical-sciences research significantly this year. The money could be squeezed into a broader supplemental-appropriations bill that legislators are expected to consider in the coming weeks to finance the Iraq war.
The Guardian: The UK's Daily Telegraph's science correspondent, Nic Fleming, is believed to be in negotations over plans to make his role redundant and, should he go, there do not seem to be plans to replace him.
The situation has reinforced the view that the media fail to recognise science's popularity with, or relevance to, the public. Reporting is either dumbed down, sensationalised, or spiked by executives with humanities degrees and an inability to distinguish one end of a hybrid embryo from another.
While science journalists proudly trace their origins back to the 1920s, doomsayers fear their field is being slowly invaded by technology correspondents (who first appeared in 1985), encroached on by health correspondents and made to seem marginal by the more recent obsession with the environment.
"Science in the daily media is too often reported in the same deferential way as political journalists used to report politics in the 1950s," says Jonathan Leake, science and environment editor at the Sunday Times. "Many of the tensions, rows and skulduggery in the science community get far less attention than they would in business or politics."
The main criticism is that respected journals such as Science and Nature - along with active news agencies such as AlphaGalileo, EurekAlert! and a plethora of less rigorous journals - control much of the science correspondents' output. An onslaught of embargoed, mid-week press releases leaves the Sundays with no choice but to pursue factually thin sensationalism.
"The science correspondents are individually very good but everyone publishes the same stories at the same time and that can make it dull," says Leake. "Although it would be a serious mistake to do away with expert science writers, any daily editor facing the pinch might wonder if they could get the same stories from the wires."
This relentless PR churn has another danger, according to Lawrence McGinty, ITV's health and science editor. "There's little time to pursue your own ideas when everyone is under pressure from news desks not to miss a story," he says.
Space.com: Experts took part in a special panel "Forging the Future of Space Science: The Next 50 Years," held at the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). The discussion is part of an international public seminar series, marking the 50th anniversary of the International Geophysical Year that launched science into space. The colloquia series is organized by the Space Studies Board, a research arm of the National Academy of Sciences. Leonard David describes some of the conclusions reached at the syposium at space.com
Nature: The popular caricature locates the origins of modern science in the natural philosophies of ancient Greece and the rediscovery of their spirit during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. It passes decorously over the intervening period, deemed to be a hotbed of superstition. In fact, the notion of a Universe governed by laws accessible to human reason — the precondition for science — emerged in Western Europe largely during the twelfth century, several hundred years earlier than we have come to imagine.
NPR: In West Virginia, science lessons on climate change have the potential to divide teachers from students, and students from their parents. But one teacher, Tiffany Litton, has earned the trust of her students. Her classroom, she says, is a place for honest inquiry, not a forum for anyone — whether the coal industry or environmentalists — to promote an agenda.
Physics Today Online: In a lecture celebrating NASA's 50th anniversary at George Washington University yesterday, theoretical astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and his daughter Lucy Hawking, a journalist and book author, argued that an active human spaceflight program is one of the few opportunities for governments to attract students into the sciences.
 “The low esteem in which science and scientists are held by the public is a significant problem,” said Stephen Hawking. “Never before has science and technology played such a big role in our lives, and yet the children of today are not interested in science.”
Lucy Hawking followed up on her father’s observation by providing examples of the public's poor grasp of scientific knowledge. She said that “72% of UK students couldn’t identify the Moon from a picture. And only 4% of US adults could name a living scientist, although 96% of those surveyed said it was important for the US to invest in science education.” A large number of scientists were inspired to go into science because of an interest in astronomy; “Kids never tire of hearing about human spaceflight,” she added.
 Stephen Hawking pointed out that NASA’s budget forms a small part of the US GNP (gross national product) and that increasing investment in the international space exploration budget by a factor of 20 would still be a small amount (0.25%) of the world’s financial resources. Humanity can afford to battle earthly problems like climate change and still have plenty of resources left over for human spaceflight exploration, he said.
"A goal of a base on the Moon by 2020 and of a manned landing on Mars by 2025 would reignite the space program and give it a sense of purpose in the same way that President Kennedy's Moon target did in the 1960s," Stephen Hawking said. Humans should return to the Moon because it is "close by and relatively easy to reach," and, assuming there are water deposits at the lunar poles, it could be a base for travel to the rest of the solar system.
 Mars would be "the obvious next target", with its abundant supplies of frozen water and minerals brought close to the surface through volcanic eruptions. "There is also tantalizing possibility that life may have been present there in the past." Saturn’s moon Titan sounds like an intriguing place to visit, he said, although it's cold: “I wouldn’t want to live next to a lake of liquid methane.”
Hawking dismissed robotic missions as a way to inspire the next generation of children because although "robotic missions are much cheaper and may provide more scientific information, they don't catch the public imagination in the same way.”
Although attracting children to science education is one of Hawking’s reasons for supporting NASA’s plans to return to the Moon, he said that human space exploration should be a long-term (200-500 years) strategy for the species, including attempting interstellar travel.
“If only 1% of the 1000 or so stars within 30 light-years of Earth has an Earth-size planet at the right distance from its star for liquid water to exist, that would make for 10 such planets in our solar system's neighborhood,” he said. “If we want the human species to survive another million years, then we need to ‘boldly go where no one has gone before.’”
Hawking also theorized about the existence of life elsewhere in the universe, stating that he believed primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare. He then joked, "some would say it has yet to occur on Earth."
BBC Newsnight: Nicholas Owen, from the solar theory group at St Andrews University got loud applause when he asked a panel on the crisis in UK science funding at the annual meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society: "I'm a PhD student in solar physics. Why, in the current climate, should I and other students take the risk of continuing to do research in this area?"
The answer he got, from John Womersley, director of science programmes at the Science and Technology Facilities Council, was criticised as patronising: "If you cared about money you wouldn't be a scientist at all would you," he told the students in the hall.
"You may feel it's a bigger gamble than you want to make, knowing what you do about future funding."
"But if it's not rewarding, and it's not exciting and you don't feel you can make a contribution, then don't do it. If you can, then let's figure out a way that you can. The future budgets make it tough, I can't deny that."
Susan Watts investigates why UK scientists are so upset with the labour government over science funding.
NPR: From a distance, the spinning windmills can look sculptural and graceful, but residents who live among wind turbines often have mixed and divergent feelings. NPR's David Baron talks to one family in upstate New York that's been divided by the impact of a local wind farm.
ORISE: The number of foreign students receiving doctorates in science and engineering from US universities and staying in this country historically has increased. In recent years, however, stay rates peaked and then declined slightly, according to a new report issued by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE).
Stay Rates of Foreign Doctorate Recipients from U.S. Universities, 2005, documents a study in which tax records were used to estimate the proportion of foreign doctorate recipients from US universities who stayed in the US after graduation for any reason.
"In many fields of science and engineering, foreign students make up the majority of doctorate recipients," says ORISE report author Michael Finn. "Universities, research labs, and other high-tech employers have become dependent on these scientists and engineers."
"However, some of the actions taken to improve security after 9/11 were widely seen as having made it harder for foreign doctorate recipients to obtain visas," Finn said. "Also, there was concern that the increased restrictions made foreign scientists feel less welcome. In addition to security issues, the macroeconomic performance of the US economy may have been a factor as well. There was a weakness from 2000–2002 that may have contributed to the minor decline in the stay rate. This report indicates that the adverse impact on stay rates was quite small—the U.S. is still keeping about two-thirds."
Two-thirds (66 percent) of foreign citizens who received science or engineering doctorates from US universities in 2003 lived in the United States in 2005, the study found. The two-year stay rate had peaked at 71 percent in the early part of this decade; thus, the more recent 66 percent rate represents a slight decline in the stay rate of foreign doctorate recipients.
Among science and engineering disciplines, the highest stay rate was recorded for computer/electrical and electronic engineering. The stay rates in agricultural sciences, economics, and the other social sciences were the lowest, according to the report.
Various: Main text currently adapted from Wikipedia John Archibald Wheeler passed away yesterday after contracting pneumonia. He is survived by two daughters, Alison Wheeler Lahnston and Letitia Wheeler Ufford, and a son, James English Wheeler.
 Wheeler was born in Jacksonville, Florida. He graduated from the Baltimore City College high school in 1926 and received his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 1933. His thesis, under the supervision of Karl Herzfeld, was on the theory of the dispersion and adsorption of helium. Wheeler married Janette Hegner in 1935 (who died last year).
Wheeler made important contributions to theoretical physics. In 1937 he introduced the S-matrix, which became an indispensable tool in particle physics. He was a pioneer in the theory of nuclear fission, along with Niels Bohr and Enrico Fermi. In 1939 he collaborated with Bohr on the liquid drop model of nuclear fission.
"For me, he was the last Titan, the only physics superhero still standing," Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist Max Tegmark told The New York Times.
Wheeler spent a significant part of his career as professor of physics at Princeton University (1938-1976), before joining the University of Texas at Austin. Wheeler's graduate students include Richard Feynman, Kip Thorne, and Hugh Everett, some of the most distinguished physicists of the second half of the 20th century. Wheeler was renowned for his teaching as well as his research. He was exemplary at finding ways to convey complex ideas in understandable terms. Even after he had achieved fame, he continued to teach freshman physics, saying that the young minds were the most important.
Together with other leading physicists, during World War II Wheeler interrupted his academic career to participate in the development of the U.S. atomic bomb under the Manhattan Project at the Hanford site, where reactors were constructed to produce plutonium for the bomb which was to be dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. Even before the Hanford site started up B-Pile (the first of three reactors), he had foreseen that the accumulation of "fission product poisons" would interrupt the ongoing nuclear chain reaction by absorbing neutrons and correctly deduced (by calculating the half-life decay rates) that an isotope of xenon (Xe135) was responsible. He went on to work on the development of the American hydrogen bomb under Project Matterhorn B.
After concluding his Project Matterhorn work, Wheeler returned to Princeton to resume his academic career. In 1957, while working on extensions to general relativity, he introduced the word wormhole to describe tunnels in space-time.
In the 1950s, he formulated geometrodynamics, a program of physical and ontological reduction of every physical phenomenon, such as gravitation and electromagnetism, to the geometrical properties of a curved space-time. Aiming at a systematical identification of matter with space, geometrodynamics was often characterized as a continuation of the philosophy of nature as conceived by Descartes and Spinoza. Wheeler's geometrodynamics, however, failed to explain some important physical phenomena, such as the existence of fermions or that of gravitational singularities. Wheeler therefore abandoned this theory in the early 1970s.
His work in general relativity included the theory of gravitational collapse; he coined the term black hole in 1967 during a talk at the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS). He was also a pioneer in the field of quantum gravity with his development (with Bryce DeWitt) of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation or, as he calls it, the "wave function of the Universe."
Recognizing Wheeler's colorful way with words, characterized by such confections as "mass without mass", the festschrift honoring his 60th birthday was fittingly entitled Magic Without Magic: John Archibald Wheeler: A collection of essays in honor of his sixtieth birthday, Ed: John R. Klauder, (W. H. Freeman, 1972, ISBN 0-7167-0337-8).
John Wheeler was the driving force behind the voluminous general relativity textbook Gravitation, co-authored with Charles Misner and Kip Thorne. Its timely appearance during the golden age of general relativity and comprehensiveness made it the most influential relativity textbook for a generation.
Wheeler was awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1997. He maintained an office in Jadwin Hall at Princeton up until 2006.
Related Physics Today articles
"Mechanism of Fission," November 1967, p 49.
"To Joseph Henry," a poem by Wheeler, February 1969, p 111.
"Introducing the Black Hole," written with Ruffino, January 1971, p30
Review of Wheeler's autobiography "Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics", May 1999, p 63-64.
Related links
A 22-session interview with John Wheeler is online at the American Institute of Physics History Center. The interview was conducted by Kenneth Ford, one of Wheeler's students, as research for the latter's autobiography, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics (Norton, 1998).
John A. Wheeler, Physicist Who Coined the Term ‘Black Hole,’ Is Dead at 96 (New York Times)
Leading physicist John Wheeler dies at age 96 (Princeton University)
Books written by Wheeler
Spacetime Physics (1963, with Edwin Taylor)
Gravitation Theory and Gravitational Collapse (1965)
Einstein's Vision (1968)
Gravitation (1973, with Misner and Thorne)
Frontiers of Time (1979)
Quantum Theory and Measurement (1983, with others)
Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam (1998, memoir)
Exploring Black Holes (2000, with Edwin Taylor)
Here is the description from one of Wheeler's colleague's posted last night to the Cosmic Variance web site.
One beautiful Fall day seventeen years ago I wandered into an office and my life profoundly changed. I was an undergraduate at Princeton, and was looking for a thesis advisor. Jadwin Hall was an intimidating place. Plenty of names familiar from my textbooks. Nobel laureates scattered about. And we were expected to just barge into their offices, and ask to work with them.
One office door was always open. As you walked by you could peek in, and see its occupant hard at work. Hunched over his notebook, scribbling away. Or standing by his bookcase, deep in thought. Most often at the blackboard, chalk in hand. This was John Archibald Wheeler, one of the legends of modern physics. He did foundational work on quantum mechanics, collaborating with Niels Bohr on some of the earliest work in nuclear fission. He invented the S-matrix. He played important roles in both the Manhattan project (atomic bomb) and the Matterhorn project (Hydrogen bomb). He made major contributions to general relativity, co-authoring with Charlie Misner and Kip Thorne the bible of the field. He was legendary for his way with words, coining such terms as wormholes, quantum foam, black holes, and the wave function of the Universe (the Wheeler-DeWitt equation). He trained generations of students; one of his first was Richard Feynman.
Fortunately, being a relatively clueless 20-year old, I was only dimly aware of these things. I was interested in gravity and cosmology, and I had heard Wheeler knew a thing or two about such topics. So I waltzed in, and asked if he had any projects I could work on. I staggered out of his office four hours later, laden with books, a clearly defined project in my hands. For the ensuing two years I spent essentially every weekday with Wheeler. Each morning I would rush over to his office, always to be greeted the same way: “What’s new?” I would have been up late the night before, desperately trying to find something interesting with which to answer that question. We would then spend hours working together, going over my results, scrutinizing my calculations, poring through the literature, brainstorming new ideas. Wheeler gave me a direct and personal introduction to the joys of research. We would break for lunch, and walk up to the faculty club. I often had trouble keeping up with him. He would always take the stairs (”No time to wait for an elevator!”). He would hook his arm into the banisters, and swing around, practically leaping from one flight to the next. This was 1990; Wheeler was 80 years old.
We would often work all afternoon (with the occasional interruption, the nuisance of having to leave for my class lectures). Every evening I would walk with him from Jadwin up across the full length of campus, to catch his bus. We would pass the corner of Ivy lane and Washington road, where he had scratched 137 into the concrete when they were pouring the sidewalk. We would pass Jones Hall, where he used to discuss relativity with Einstein. We would continue on through campus, crossing in front of Nassau Hall. Wheeler would insist we walk diagonally to the far gate, instead of exiting through the more convenient FitzRandolph Gate. An Undergraduate was not meant to exit FitzRandolph Gate until graduation, and Wheeler didn’t want to be responsible for what might occur were I to break tradition.
For two years I sat at the foot of the master, and I absorbed as much as I could. I learned about science, and about life. Wheeler had broad interests. We would often discuss biology, or history, or poetry. Over the ensuing years we kept in touch. We collaborated together on Wheeler’s last published paper.
Yesterday I spent a couple of hours at Wheeler’s bedside. I tried to say thank you. But it was impossible to convey how much he means to me, and how grateful I am to him. In that moment when I crossed the threshold to his office, I was embarking on a new path. I am still on that path, and every day I am grateful to him for showing me the way.
John Wheeler died this morning.
Nature: Dismissal of toxicologist raises concerns over delayed safety report
NPR: The U.S. atomic bomb was such a secret, scientists and engineers sometimes talked in code. It was the Manhattan Project, not "The Atomic Bomb Project." Plutonium was referred to as "copper," and the bomb itself as "the gadget."
But at the same time, scientists and engineers were furiously filing secret patent applications that described many of the parts in exquisite detail. Those patents sat not behind the fences at Los Alamos, but in a vault at the U.S. Patent Office.
Space Review: Two letters in Space Review debate whether the risks associated with the hydrazine fuel tank were fully understood by the public and the US Defense Department (DoD) before the US Navy shot down a disabled US spy satellite (see Broken spy satellite hit by US missile). The US was concerned that the fuel tank might survive reentry into the atmosphere and contaminate a wide area with the toxic hydrazine fuel.
 Andrew Higgins of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, suggests that critics of the decision to shoot down the satellite, have not fully grasped hydrazine's burn rate at the pressure contained in the tank or calculated the tank's reentry survivability.
In independent computer simulations of the reentry of the USA 193 satellite, Geoff Forden of MIT and Higgins, found that the maximum deceleration of the tank would have been about 8 to 10 g’s. "This is similar to the g-loading the fully fueled tank is designed to withstand upon launch," says Higgins. "Thus, it is unlikely that a similar loading would have destroyed the tank on reentry."
Yousaf Butt of the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University points out that questions should be raised about the overall quality of the DoD's reentry simulation models, because the DoD did not predict the hydrazine explosion that occurred during the interception.
"It would serve NASA/NRO/DoD well to immediately publicize the unclassified portions of their studies so that the US public can ascertain whether the putative public health concern of the hydrazine surviving reentry was indeed well-founded," says Butt. "As technical details of hydrazine tanks are freely available online, it is difficult to comprehend what is so classified about these studies."
Related links
Broken spy satellite hit by US missile (Physics Today Online)
North Canada, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans likely path of spy satellite debris (Physics Today Online)
More doubts surface over Pentagon’s explanation for shooting down spy satellite (Physics Today Online)
New York Times: A new book, “Unknown Waters,” recounts the 1970 voyage of a submarine, the Queenfish, on a pioneering dive beneath the ice pack to map the Siberian continental shelf. The United States did so as part of a clandestine effort to prepare for Arctic submarine operations and to win any military showdown with the Soviet Union.
In great secrecy, moving as quietly as possible below treacherous ice, the Queenfish, under the command of Alfred S. McLaren, mapped thousands of miles of previously uncharted seabed in search of safe submarine routes. New York Times reporter William J. Broad talks to McLaren about his year-long voyage and the dangers of submarining under the Arctic pack ice.
Related links
Scientist at work: Alfred McLaren; Explorer of Arctic Depths Plans Another Trip North (New York Times October 29, 2002)
New York Times: Utility executives in Kansas were shocked last fall when a state environmental official rejected two coal-fired power plants because of the millions of tons of carbon-dioxide emissions they could produce. In a state where coal generates 73 percent of the electricity, the pro-coal forces were unable to work their will.
That ineffectiveness will be underscored as early as Friday if Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, as expected, vetoes an effort by the Kansas State Legislature to ensure the plants are approved. A handful of lawmakers seeking a new energy policy are blocking the attempt to override.
The struggle over those plants is an example of a growing trend in climate-change politics. In the absence of clear federal mandates for emissions from smokestack industries, states that have been proving grounds for new environmental approaches to energy are becoming battlegrounds as well
Science: In 2000, when Vijayalakshmi Ravindranath was appointed director of the National Brain Research Centre in Gurgaon, the neuroscientist made history. Ravin-dranath became the first woman to lead any of the 65 institutes under India's Ministry of Science and Technology--and today she is one of only two women who have broken the ministry's glass ceiling. When it comes to promoting women scientists in India, she says, "our record is dismal."
It may be surprising that women scientists are struggling in the nation that elected Indira Gandhi prime minister in 1966. But at a conference in New Delhi to mark International Women's Day on 8 March, more than 1000 scientists spoke of barriers to advancement and debated how to attract more women into research careers. At the meeting, science minister Kapil Sibal announced what he calls "fledgling steps to … empower women to have their rightful role in science," including new regulations to allow women with young children to work more flexible hours.
State of the news media: The Project for Excellence in Journalism has released an analysis of scientific coverage in TV and newspapers that suggests that on average five hours of cable television news produces six minutes of science, technology, health and the environment. Three minutes and 46 seconds of these minutes consist of health and health care coverage, 1 minute and 25 seconds about the environment, and finally 1 minute about science and technology.
According to the report, online news sites, spend one minute, and both newspapers and network television news spend the equivalent of two minutes on science and technology.
Wired: Trying to pin down how much the Defense Department is spending on space combat research -- and on what projects -- is difficult. The programs are spread across at least a dozen different accounts; much of the technology involved is "dual use" -- meaning, it could help with another military matters, too; and that's before you get into the Defense Department's "black," classified budget.
According to the Center for Defense Information, the Pentagon will spend at minimum $520 million in the 2009 budget on research that could lead to arms in space.
Washington Post: A plan by the Environmental Protection Agency to close several of its 26 research libraries did not fully account for the impact on government staffers and the public, who rely on the libraries for hard-to-find environmental data, congressional investigators reported yesterday.
The report by the Government Accountability Office found that the EPA effort, begun in 2006 to comply with a $2 million funding cut sought by the White House, may have hurt access to materials and services in the 37-year-old library network.
Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.), chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, said the report reveals a "grim picture" of mismanagement at the EPA.
Science: The Royal Society, the United Kingdom's academy of science, is taking the unusual step of getting into the venture capital business. Last month, it announced the creation of an Enterprise Fund, with the aim of funneling money into start-up companies seeking to commercialize the fruits of academic research. The society says that although it does much to support science and teaching, as well as contributing to policy debates, it could be more active in applying science for public benefit--either by simply boosting the U.K. economy or tackling problems such as carbon capture, renewable energy, and water purification. "If there are difficulties getting science into the marketplace, the society has a role helping with that," says Andrew Mackintosh, a chemical physicist-turned-businessman who has been brought in to run the fund.
The Daily Times: Physicists from CERN and the Abdul Salam International Centre for Physics have lauded a decision by Punjab University Chancellor Khalid Maqbool to fire five plagiarists at the university.
In February, on the recommendations of an inquiry committee, the governor ‘forcibly’ retired on charges of plagiarism PU Centre for High Energy Physics director Fazle Aleem along with Rashid Ahmad, Sohail Afzal Tahir, M Aslam Saeed and Maqsood Ahmad.
The issue had delayed approval of a Rs 110 million grant to the university until the matter was satisfactorily resolved. The Higher Education Commission (HEC) released the funds on shortly after the inquiry panel announced their decision.
Washington Post: A presidential panel today said America's math education system is "broken" and called on schools to focus lessons to ensure children from preschool to middle school master key skills.
The National Mathematics Advisory Panel was convened by President Bush in April 2006 to address concerns that many of today's students lack the math know-how needed to become tomorrow's engineers and scientists. The 24-member panel of mathematicians and education experts announced recommendations to improve instruction and make better textbooks and even called on researchers to find ways to combat "mathematics anxiety."
International test scores released last year showed 15-year-olds in the United States trailed peers from 23 industrialized countries in math.
The report comes days after Microsoft chairman Bill Gates testified in Congress that the Federal government, which pours money into basic research graduate school students in science and engineering programs, is essentially subsiding the education of foreign students and then losing their talent when they cannot stay in the country after graduating. More than 60% of graduate school students in science and engineering programs are from abroad.
“I believe this country stands at a crossroads,” said Gates, adding that if these issues are not addressed, then innovation, the engine of economic progress in the United States, will shift to other nations that are more committed to technological excellence, costing the country many high-paying jobs.
Related links
Audio from NPR on Bill Gates testimony
news.com: Spanish renewable energy firm Sener and Abu Dhabi's clean-energy initiative, Masdar, announced a joint venture on Wednesday to build several power plants fueled by the sun's heat.
The newly created firm, Torresol Energy, said it plans to build at least two large concentrating solar power plants a year with a goal of generating 320 megawatts over the next 5 years and 1,000 megawatts in 10 years. A large coal-fired power plant typically can produce hundreds of megawatts of electricity.
The initial scope of the project is small compared to the total electrical consumption in the Middle East, but a report from the German Physical Society suggests that 50 years from now, the Middle East could be exporting liquid hydrogen to Europe from massive solar array complexes.
The Daily Times: Physicists from CERN and the Abdul Salam International Centre for Physics have lauded a decision by Punjab University Chancellor Khalid Maqbool to fire five plagiarists at the university.
In February, on the recommendations of an inquiry committee, the governor ‘forcibly’ retired on charges of plagiarism PU Centre for High Energy Physics director Fazle Aleem along with Rashid Ahmad, Sohail Afzal Tahir, M Aslam Saeed and Maqsood Ahmad.
The issue had delayed approval of a Rs 110 million grant to the university until the matter was satisfactorily resolved. The Higher Education Commission (HEC) released the funds on shortly after the inquiry panel announced their decision.
Physics Today: Michael (Michał) Heller, a Polish cosmologist and Catholic priest who research specializes on the origin and cause of the universe, often under intense governmental repression, has won the 2008 $1.6 million Templeton Prize.
 Heller's current work focuses on noncommutative geometry and groupoid theory in mathematics which attempts to remove the problem of an initial cosmological singularity at the origin of the universe. "If on the fundamental level of physics there is no space and no time, as many physicists think," says Heller, "noncommutative geometry could be a suitable tool to deal with such a situation."
Heller described his philosophy earlier today as
"Various processes in the universe can be displayed as a succession of states in such a way that the preceding state is a cause of the succeeding one… (and) there is always a dynamical law prescribing how one state should generate another state. But dynamical laws are expressed in the form of mathematical equations, and if we ask about the cause of the universe we should ask about a cause of mathematical laws. By doing so we are back in the Great Blueprint of God's thinking the universe, the question on ultimate causality…: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" When asking this question, we are not asking about a cause like all other causes. We are asking about the root of all possible causes."
The 2008 Templeton Prize will be officially awarded to Heller by HRH Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, at a private ceremony at Buckingham Palace in the UK on Wednesday, May 7th.
Heller plans to dedicate the Templeton Prize money to help create the Copernicus Center in conjunction with Jagiellonian University and the Pontifical Academy of Theology in Cracow to further research and education in science and theology as an academic discipline.
Washington Post: China is rapidly becoming a leading manufacturer of solar-cells. Unfortunately, the highly toxic waste -- silicon tetrachloride -- from the production of polysilicon, which is used to make solar cells, is polluting ground water and the surrounding villages around the plants. Unlike in the West where stricter environmental regulations are in effect, solar plants in China have not installed technology to prevent pollutants from getting into the environment or have not brought those systems fully online, writes Washington post reporter Ariana Eunjung Cha.
"The land where you dump or bury it will be infertile. No grass or trees will grow in the place. . . . It is like dynamite -- it is poisonous, it is polluting. Human beings can never touch it," said Ren Bingyan, a professor at the School of Material Sciences at Hebei Industrial University. Shi Jun, a former photovoltaic technology researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences estimates that Chinese companies are saving millions of dollars by not installing pollution recovery. "If this happened in the United States, you'd probably be arrested," he said.
Physics Today: Millionaire physicist Bill Foster may be the only democrat candidate running for Congressional office that has had an entire section of his campaign web site devoted to the particle accelerators and superconducting magnets. More remarkably, he just won a closely fought election by 53% to 47% in what is a republican stronghold.
 Foster defeated businessman and dairy magnate Jim Oberweis in a special election in Illinois to replace Republican representative Dennis Hastert, former Speaker of the House, who announced his retirement on November 26, 2007. Foster's campaign was supported by Illinois Senator Barak Obama, an endorsement that helped boost democratic turnout for the special election.
“Back in the laboratory, this is what we’d say was a pretty successful experiment,” said Foster, in a victory speech at a banquet hall in Aurora. “You sent a clear message to everyone in Washington. You demanded change, and you are demanding it now.”
Foster, who founded a successful national theater lighting company and has a 22-year career at Fermilab as a high energy physicist, worked on the collider detector that discovered the top quark and is the co-inventor of Fermilab’s antiproton recycler ring. Fermilab is near the heart of his congressional district, and has had to lay off 10% of its staff due to the decimation of the high energy physics budget for 2008.
Foster won’t have much time to become established in Washington political circles as the seat is up for grabs in November. He is sworn in on Thursday, when official certification of the election results are sent to Congress.
Related links
Fermilab rescue too late (2/7/2008)
Fermilab to Begin Furloughs on Friday (1/26/2008)
Federal cuts may doom Fermilab's bid for ILC (1/24/2008)
Budget blow to US science (12/28/2007)
Fermilab to cut 200 jobs, staff forced to take unpaid days off (12/21/2007)
Washington Post: The task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperatures may be far more difficult than previous research suggested, say scientists who have just published studies indicating that it would require the world to cease carbon emissions altogether within a matter of decades.
Their findings, published in separate journals over the past few weeks, suggest that both industrialized and developing nations must wean themselves off fossil fuels by as early as mid-century in order to prevent warming that could change precipitation patterns and dry up sources of water worldwide.
Using advanced computer models to factor in deep-sea warming and other aspects of the carbon cycle that naturally creates and removes carbon dioxide (CO2), the scientists, from countries including the United States, Canada and Germany, are delivering a simple message: The world must bring carbon emissions down to near zero to keep temperatures from rising further.
Knoxville News Sentinel: New Scientist magazine is reporting that problems with a super-secret material manufactured at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant are what's holding up efforts to refurbish W76 warheads, which are deployed on Trident missiles.
According to the magazine's report by Rob Edwards, the material is code-named "Fogbank" and is extremely hazardous. It is reportedly produced at Y-12's new Purification Facility, a $50 million facility that was completed in mid-2005.
Meanwhile Air Force General Kevin Chilton, head of U.S. Strategic Command, is pressing Congress to accelerate plans for a feasibility study of the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program. Chilton says that the study is crucial to advise the incoming president next year on how best to modernize the atomic arsenal.
The Guardian: "I have lived most of my life in the expectation of an early death, so time has always been precious to me" says Stephen Hawking in reponse to one of six questions asked by Guardian reporter Rachel Cooke. "I have so much that I want to do. I hate wasting time," he adds. Cooke asks Hawking Is the study of philosophy and theology a waste of time? What does he expect the Large Hadron Collider to discover? Does Hawking feel optimistic about the future of the human race? Is he afraid? Will time travel be possible? Cooke also interviews Hawkings family and friends in an attempt to discover the man and scientist behind the celebrity fame.
Christian Science Monitor: From roadless villages in Alaska to remote bends in the Mississippi River, developers are staking claim to thousands of miles of America's oceans and rivers to test devices that use waves and currents to produce electric power.
Their experiments are launching a new industry that has the potential to supply up to 10 percent of America's electric needs. But critics say rapid federal approval of the exclusive right to conduct these experiments amounts to a private seizure of communities' waterfronts.
National Geographic: Self-induced drought and climate change may have caused the destruction of the Maya civilization, say scientists working with new satellite technology that monitors Central America's environment.
Science: As a legendary designer of communications satellites, Harold Rosen doesn't need to spend his ninth decade figuring out how to land a cheap probe that can maneuver and send back pictures from the moon's surface. But when Google announced last year that it was joining with the nonprofit X Prize Foundation to sponsor the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize, the National Medal of Technology winner decided to dust off an idea for a tubular, spinning payload that had been "in the back of my head" for decades. "We think we have the team to win it, and we're raring to go," says Rosen, who believes he can do for $20 million.
The Guardian (Audio): Science writer Matt Ridley introduces physicist Alan Sokal's talk on the science of enquiry as part of the Sense About Science lecture series
Newsweek: Although energy is proving to be an important topic in the US presidential elections, it may be a "vain hope" for a new administration to implement a unified energy policy writes David Victor in Newsweek. Previous experience shows that the coalition of groups urging for a change, national security analysts, environmentalists, and labor groups, is too diverse to sustain a concentrated two-decade program of change across all the government departments that impact energy policy says Victor. Both Europe and Asisa suffer from similar structural problems he adds, but the effort to combat global warming might change this pessimistic iron rule of energy policy as the environmental community that is the core of the coalition in support of global warming policy is becoming much stronger and has shown some staying power. Says Victor, "For the moment, however, that is a hypothesis to be proved."
Associated Press: The US Navy must abide by limits on its sonar training off the Southern California because the exercises could harm dozens of species of whales and dolphins, a federal appeals court ruled. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday night rejected the Navy's appeal of restrictions that banned high-powered sonar within 12 nautical miles of the coast and set other limits that could affect Navy training exercises to begin this month.
Related Article
Legal battle over sonar testing heats up (Physics Today February 2008)
The Guardian: A meeting this morning of the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) will outline its next steps in dealing with an £80m hole in its budget. Further job losses and cuts to research programs are expected.
New York Times: Nearly half a century ago, Frank Drake, a young radio astronomer with extraterrestrials on his mind, stepped up to a blackboard in Green Bank, W.Va., and scribbled a string of symbols intended to bring some clarity to the question of just how alone humanity is in the cosmos. The Drake Equation, as it is known, has served as the bones of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and for the hopeful field of astrobiology ever since. Drake, who conducted the first fruitless SETI listening tour, of a pair of stars in 1960, once said that the most likely aliens to hear from would be a race of immortals, who had plenty of time to wait for an answer. But he said now that he no longer expected to hear from ET in his lifetime. Under realistic estimates, he said, you would need to look at 10 million stars (there are 200 billion in the galaxy), and there is not enough time left. Another trend on Earth, where powerful radio and tv transmitters are being replaced by undersea cables and satellites, mean that the Earth is becoming radio quiet, and ET might have done the same. “That’s big change nobody anticipated,” said Drake. Once the big powerful transmitters go off the air, “We will still exist but we will be hard to detect.”
Various: The US has successfully hit USA 193, a 3-ton out-of-control spy satellite that failed 1.5 days after its launch in December 2006. Earlier this week the US announced plans to destroy the satellite because of the risk to humans over the toxic fuel the satellite was carrying. In a press conference held after the collision, General James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that he was very confident that they had hit the satellite and that the hydrazine fuel tank was destroyed. "Thus far we've seen nothing larger than a football among the debris," he said. At least 552 pieces of the satellite have been spotted by amateur satellite watchers.
 The decision to destroy the satellite has caused controversy within the public arms control community and by the Russian and Chinese governments, because of the low-risk associated with the public coming into contact with parts of the satellite. China is calling on the US to release more information about debris from the strike, and Russian diplomats are calling the incident a anti-satellite weapons test, a charge denied by US government officials. China tested its own anti-satellite weapon early last year, an action that was publicly protested by the US.
Earlier this week the US refused to discuss a proposed treaty by China and Russia to ban space-based anti-satellite weapons. According to Liu Jianchao, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, "The Chinese side is continuing to closely follow the US action, which may influence the security of outer space and may harm other countries." Bruce W. MacDonald and Charles D. Ferguson say that the action taken over USA 193, may lead to a new arms race.
Related links
North Canada, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans likely path of spy satellite debris (Physics Today Online)
Experts query Pentagon’s explanation for shooting down spy satellite (Physics Today Online)
US 'confident' over satellite hit (BBC)
China accuses US of double standards over satellite strike (the Guardian)
Navy missile hits failing spy satellite (LA Times)
Missile Strikes a Spy Satellite Falling From Its Orbit (New York Times)
Pentagon: Missile Scored Direct Hit on Satellite (NPR)
Rob Ratkowski's USA 193 debris photos (SeeSat)
Instructions from FEMA on what to do if you find debris
Opinion: Taking friendly fire to new heights (LA Times)
Updated 2/22/2008 An Errant Satellite Is Gone, but Questions Linger (New York Times)
The satellite takedown doesn't prove anything about our missile-defense capability (Slate.com)
Spy Satellite's Downing Shows a New U.S. Weapon Capability (Washington Post)
Various: The first attempt at shooting down a disabled spy satellite will occur on Wednesday assuming bad weather does not delayed plans to launch. The US Navy had been waiting for the space shuttle Atlantis to land before its first attempt. Ted Molczan, an amateur satellite watcher says that the satellite is due to pass overhead at 10:30pm and according to space.com the Pentagon has warned aircraft to stay out of the area for the next two days.
The strike will cost between $40 and $60 million. The decaying orbital path of the satellite suggests that debris from the satellite will burn up on re-entry over the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans or over the sparsely populated Northern Canada provinces.
 According to calculations by Geoffrey Forden from MIT and colleagues of Jeffrey Lewis, the interceptor will hit the satellite at slightly less velocity than the Pentagon suggested, 9.4 km/s instead of 9.83 km/s. If the missile misses, it will take another 13 hours before another attempt can be taken. The likehood that it will come down in a populated area and cause a causality is calculated at 0.035%.
More and more analysts are becoming convinced that the shootdown is a statement about missile defense rather than the risk of the satellite hitting a populated area says Laura Grego, an astrophysicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists Global Security Program. "If the Pentagon demonstrates that its missile defense systems can destroy satellites, it will be very difficult to convince other countries that they shouldn't develop a similar anti‑satellite capability," she adds. Moreover, the strike will tell us little about the effectiveness of the Navy system against an actual missile, Grego says, as the satellite does not have decoys or other countermeasures, and its trajectory and the time of the engagement are known in advance, none of which would be expected in a real‑world attack.
Related links
Experts query Pentagon’s explanation for shooting down spy satellite
Geoffrey Forden’s analysis
USA 193 Risk Calculation
Attempt to shoot down spy satellite to cost up to $60 million
ObSat.com
USA 193 plot through restricted zone
U.S. Navy Might Shoot Down Spy Satellite Wednesday Night
Weather may delay satellite shootdown
Satellite Shot Offers Navy Key Space Defense Trial: How It Works
FEMA instructions on what to do if you find debris
Physics Today: Updated 2/18/2008 An out-of-control spy satellite called USA 193, which was launched in December 2006 but never reached its correct orbit, will be shot down by the US Navy with a Aegis SM-3 missile before the satellite re-enters Earth's atmosphere, says Joint Chiefs of Staff vice chairman James Cartwright. The decision, ordered by President Bush, is causing controversy in the wake of China's shooting down a weather satellite last year (see Physics Today articles China Raises Stakes on Space Arms Race March 2007 and Space debris October 2007) and because of the reasons given by the Bush administration for destroying the satellite. In a Pentagon press conference held with deputy national security advisor James Jeffrey and NASA administrator Michael Griffin this afternoon (14 February 2008), Cartwright said the highly toxic hydrazine fuel that the spy satellite uses is a significant risk to human health, so dispersing the fuel before re-entry would be safer. USA 193 would be hit “just prior to its hitting the Earth's atmosphere,” Cartwright said. It would be the first time a tactical missile has been used to take out a satellite instead of another missile. Not everyone is convinced however by the Pentagon's explanation (more).
Continue reading "More doubts surface over Pentagon's explanation for shooting down spy satellite" »
New York Times: A gunman killed five students and wounded 16 others in a Northern Illinois University lecture hall on Thursday afternoon in DeKalb before killing himself, according to university and police officials.
John G. Peters, the president of Northern Illinois University, reported at a news conference that four of the dead were women and two were men. He said four died at the scene, including the gunman, and the other two died at the hospital. All the wounded and the dead were students, including the graduate student leading the ocean sciences class.
Wired: The stream of stories about the Large Hadron Collider's operation is getting genuinely weird. Nineteen-sixties, little-green-monster, B-movie sci-fi weird. Not, mind you, that that's an entirely bad thing.
Washington Post: Either Kim Jong Il or Pervez Musharraf is lying about whether Pakistan's Abdul Qadeer Khan, gave centrifuges to North Korea for uranium enrichment. Unless the truth can be established, the hitherto-promising denuclearization negotiations with Pyongyang are likely to collapse says Selig Harrison in the Washington Post. Khan has been shielded from foreign interrogators since his arrest three years ago for trafficking nuclear technology, but many Pakistanis believe that Musharraf is stonewalling because he and some of his army generals collaborated with Khan and fear exposure.
Science: An inadequate budget and daunting technical challenges will force the next U.S. president to rethink current plans for a postshuttle NASA. Space scientists are offering input on what those changes might look like.
New York Times: Solar power is booming in California, the product of billions of dollars in investment and great enthusiasm.
MSNBC: President Bush's final State of the Union address broke new rhetorical ground on the scientific front, marking the first time he uttered the words "stem cells" and "carbon emissions" in his annual summing-up speech. He also received a standing ovation when he called on Congress to double the funding for basic research – and that applause should come as music to the ears of physicists facing layoffs.
San Francisco Chronicle: The Project on Government Oversight says it was told by some Los Alamos scientists that a newly manufactured plutonium trigger used in the W88 warhead on top of the Trident ICBM needed 72 waivers from the specifications used for the original triggers, including 53 engineering-related changes.
Physics Today: Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt gave the first NASA 50th anniversary lecture of 2008 at the Newseum in Washington D.C. earlier today. In his 40 minute speech he urged NASA and other space agencies to consider public-private partnerships and open data standards to drive the next stage of space innovation.
Continue reading "Google CEO says NASA should become more 'open source'" »
The New York Times: School authorities’ cancellation of a talk that a Nobel laureate climate researcher was to have given to high school students has deeply divided this small farming and ranching town at the base of the east side of the Rocky Mountains.
Nature: As the US campaign revs up, mathematicians debate how states should be represented.
Physics Today: In the third quarter of 2007, Physics Today asked all the presidential candidates a series of questions related to science policy. Despite repeated quests by the online Physics Today staff, all the candidates declined to comment. In response Physics Today has collected material from the candidates web site, and quotes from the candidates public speeches on six related science policy issues: science education, teaching evolution, nuclear weapons, science investment, energy policy and climate change. This new campaign 2008 site will track the candidates views on science policy throughout 2008.
Presidential candidates: Where do you stand on climate change?
Virtually all reputable research supports the conclusion that global warming is a growing crisis caused, at least in part, by the burning of fossil fuels. Would you propose mechanisms to control and reduce carbon emissions through a carbon tax, a "cap and trade: system, or some other regulatory program? Would you favor a moratorium on coal-fired power plants that do not capture and sequester CO2? Should a U.S. program to limit CO2 emissions depend on what other countries do?
See the answers at http://blogs.physicstoday.org/politics08/climate.html
Physics Today: In the third quarter of 2007, Physics Today asked all the presidential candidates a series of questions related to science policy. Despite repeated quests by the online Physics Today staff, all the candidates declined to comment. In response Physics Today has collected material from the candidates web site, and quotes from the candidates public speeches on six related science policy issues: science education, teaching evolution, nuclear weapons, science investment, energy policy and climate change. This new campaign 2008 site will track the candidates views on science policy throughout 2008.
Presidential candidates: Where do you stand on science investment?
As expressed by several recent national studies and reports, there is ongoing concern in the scientific and industrial communities that the U.S. is losing its world leadership in science. Do you support a significant boost in federal funding for basic research across the sciences, and how would you pay for such an increase? In an era of tight budgets and man y worthy programs, what priority would you give science education and research?
See the answers at http://blogs.physicstoday.org/politics08/investment.html
Physics Today: In the third quarter of 2007, Physics Today asked all the presidential candidates a series of questions related to science policy. Despite repeated quests by the online Physics Today staff, all the candidates declined to comment. In response Physics Today has collected material from the candidates web site, and quotes from the candidates public speeches on six related science policy issues: science education, teaching evolution, nuclear weapons, science investment, energy policy and climate change. This new campaign 2008 site will track the candidates views on science policy throughout 2008.
Presidential candidates: Where do you stand on nuclear weapons
The U.S. currently maintains its arsenal of about 10,000 nuclear weapons through the Stockpile Stewardship program, Given the concerns about nuclear terrorism and the proliferation of nuclearwepaons in other countries, is there an immediately need to change the .S. nuclear arsenal? Should the reliable replacement Warhead, or another smaller, "tactical" nuclear weapon be developed? Under what circumstances would you support the resumption of nuclear testing? Do you support the reduction in size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal?
See the answers at http://blogs.physicstoday.org/politics08/nuclear.html
Physics Today: In the third quarter of 2007, Physics Today asked all the presidential candidates a series of questions related to science policy. Despite repeated quests by the online Physics Today staff, all the candidates declined to comment. In response Physics Today has collected material from the candidates web site, and quotes from the candidates public speeches on six related science policy issues: science education, teaching evolution, nuclear weapons, science investment, energy policy and climate change. This new campaign 2008 site will track the candidates views on science policy throughout 2008.
Presidential candidates: Where do you stand on energy policy?
More than two decades of proposals have not resulted in a comprehensive U.S. energy policy. what incentives or controls would you advocate to improve energy efficiency and conservation? Looking 10 years into the future, what should the U.S. energy mix be, and what role should nuclear energy play?
See the answers at http://blogs.physicstoday.org/politics08/energy.html
Catholic News: Updated: The offices of the Vatican observatory in Rome are to be moved to a newer location with more modern facilities says the Independent newspaper and CatholicNews service.
The Vatican observatory at Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome, has been at the Pope's summer residence for more than 75 years.
NPR: Over the past year, tensions between Iran and the United States have risen to unprecedented levels. At the same time, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad faces more criticism internally than at any time since he took office more than two years ago. Mike Shuster takes a year-end look at the ongoing controversy and diplomacy surrounding Iran's nuclear program.
New York Times: In 1950 Alabama, a small cotton producing town called Huntsville lost a bid for a military aviation project that would have revived its fortune. The consolation prize was dubious: 118 German rocket scientists who had surrendered to the Americans during World War II, led by a man — a crackpot, evidently — who claimed humans could visit the moon.
Ultimately those German immigrants made history, launching the first American satellite, Explorer I, into orbit in January 1958 and putting astronauts on the moon in 1969.
Far less attention, though, has been given to the space program’s permanent transformation of Huntsville, now a city of 170,000 with one of the country’s highest concentrations of scientists and engineers.
BBC: North Korea has failed to meet a deadline to disclose details of its nuclear programme by the end of 2007.
Wired: On a recent Wednesday night the crowd spilled out the door at San Francisco’s Axis Café, where the draw wasn't a hot band or a talented bartender, but a lecture. On physics.
Toby Garfield, an oceanographer at San Francisco State University, was explaining the science of big ocean waves, like the giant Mavericks surf break about 25 miles away. As he showed slides of the ocean floor and explained that the coast is a system of energy dissipation, the crowd peppered him with questions. Why do waves come in sets? What are rogue waves? How is the United States harnessing the power of waves to make renewable energy?
Scenes like this are being repeated across the country at science cafes, where contemporary science -- a topic that Americans supposedly find dull -- is drawing substantial crowds month after month, even on topics as nerdy as gene sequencing and dark matter.
Salon.com: Fed up with politicians and the media, scientists are pleading to the world to wake up to the imminent threats of global warming.
BBC: The UK government is to review its funding for physics after scientists warned of an £80m research shortfall that could lead to 750 physicists losing their jobs. Science Minister Ian Pearson said funding arrangements would be reviewed, but did not promise extra money.
"Scientific research is not a luxury, it is a necessity," Dr Brian Cox, of Manchester University's School of Physics and Astronomy, said of the shortfall.
Wired: About 400 technical hobbyists are taking advantage of a glut of surplus precision timekeeping gear to pursue a serious interest in very precise timekeeping. They call themselves Time Nuts, and they spend their spare cycles collecting, repairing, tweaking -- and occasionally using -- super-precise atomic clocks. Wired magazines has the details on how to build your own atomic clock.
MSNBC: High school students sweep competition, winning $100,000 scholarships
Science: A novel program at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to support innovative ways of communicating science faces an uncertain fate. The 4-year-old Discovery Corps Fellowship (DCF) program has attracted few applicants, and in a time of tight funding, a new program solicitation that's about to hit the streets could be its last. Fellows say one big obstacle is that the scientific community, for all its handwringing about a scientifically illiterate public, still views outreach as a dubious activity for those on an academic career path.
Christian Science Monitor: Engineers who want to produce hydrogen for fuel have to think outside the box. Standard processes are too costly and inefficient. A sample of research reported this year illustrates the unexpected possibilities such creative thinking opens up.
Associated Press: Chris Comer, the Texas state’s director of science curriculum said she resigned this month under pressure from officials who said she had given the appearance of criticizing the teaching of intelligent design.
The Texas Education Agency put the director on 30 days’ paid administrative leave in late October, resulting in what Ms. Comer called a forced resignation.
The move came shortly after she forwarded an e-mail message announcing a presentation by Barbara Forrest, an author of “Creationism’s Trojan Horse.” The book argues that creationist politics are behind the movement to get intelligent design theory taught in public schools. Ms. Comer sent the message to several people and a few online communities.
“Ms. Comer’s e-mail implies endorsement of the speaker and implies that T.E.A. endorses the speaker’s position on a subject on which the agency must remain neutral,” said a representative of the Texas Education Agency.
Continue reading "TX science curriculum director claims she was ousted after criticizing intelligent design" »
Washington Post: Sandra G. Boodman investigates one of D.C.'s smaller museums, the Koshland Science Museum.
ScienceNow: It's not quite a rehabilitation. But a new study clears Dutch physics Nobel laureate Petrus “Peter” Debye of the most serious accusations that arose last year after publications about his past in Nazi Germany. Debye, who succeeded Albert Einstein at the helm of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin in 1934, was not an anti-Semite or a Nazi, the study concludes--but it knocks him for opportunism.
New York Times: Over the past six years, the Bush administration has spent almost $100 million on a highly classified program to help Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, secure his country’s nuclear weapons, according to current and former senior administration officials.
But with the future of that country’s leadership in doubt, debate is intensifying about whether Washington has done enough to help protect the warheads and laboratories, and whether Pakistan’s reluctance to reveal critical details about its arsenal has undercut the effectiveness of the continuing security effort.
Tri-City Herald: Mid-Columbia news: Florists are worried about filling balloon orders and Richland scientists might have to change their research techniques. What's got them blown out of shape? A helium shortage. The odorless gas is becoming a scarcer commodity worldwide.
Politico: A new survey by an environmental group suggests that tackling climate change is an issue republicans can no longer ignore. As Jim VandeHei and John F. Harris report in Politico, Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.), once a skeptic of global warming, got a hint that the political winds might be shifting when a longtime supporter warned that he might vote against Inglis if he “didn’t clean up his act on the environment.” The warning came from Inglis’ eldest son, Robert Jr., now 22.
Now Inglis believes the science behind global warming, and a number of Republican thinkers are coming to the same conclusion. Environmental Defense, a special interest group pushing for limits on greenhouse gases and other global warming solutions, commissioned Republican pollster Whit Ayres to survey voters in the 49 most competitive House races, and the polling data suggests that independent voters in particular, will hold representatives accountable if not enough is done to combat climate change.
The New York Times: By nature, code names and cover stories are meant to give no indication of the secrets concealed. “Magic” was the name for intelligence gleaned from Japanese ciphers in World War II, and “Overlord” stood for the Allied plan to invade Europe.
Various: The award of last week's Nobel Peace Prize in two equal parts, between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change is a profoundly positive influence for science says physicist Clifford V. Johnson of the University of Southern California. IPCC chairman Rajendra K. Pachauri agrees and says science has won over skepticism.
Slate's Stephen Faris looks more closely at whether there are links between climate change and conflict, "Indications of changes in the earth's future climate must be treated with the utmost seriousness," said Ole Danbolt Mjøs, the Nobel Prize committee chairman. "There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states."
The New York Times looks at the different styles and substance between the two award winners, with the IPCC issuing reports and former Vice President Al Gore, delivers brimstone-laden warnings of an unfolding “planetary emergency.” says correspondent Andrew C. Revkin.
“It’s every scientist's dream to win a Nobel Prize, so this is great for myself and the hundreds that worked on their reports over the years. It is perhaps a little deflating though - that one man and his PowerPoint show has as much influence as the decades of dedicated work by so many scientists,” says Piers Forster, of the University of Leeds School of Earth and Environment.
More than 2,500 researchers from more than 130 nations provide input into the IPCC reports. The IPCC was set up in 1988 to assess the issue of climate change. "This must be the most maligned institution on earth, in that it’s a very conservative scientific panel which chooses only the science which is rock-solid, and yet it’s often portrayed as an insane radical organization trying to overthrow civilization as we know it," says environmentalist George Monbiot speaking to DemocracyNow's Amy Goodman, "And it’s fought a long, hard battle for the science to be heard, and that battle is now being rewarded."
In fact, as a New York Times editorial points out, "What the citation didn’t mention but needs to be said is that it shouldn’t have to be left to a private citizen — even one so well known as Mr. Gore — or a panel of scientists to raise that alarm or prove what is now clearly an undeniable link or champion solutions to a problem that endangers the entire planet."
"That should be, and must be the job of governments. And governments — above all the Bush administration — have failed miserably..."
In February, the IPCC issued a report increasing the likelihood that human activity is the cause of a global-warming trend in recent decades at 90%, up from 66% in 2001.
"The Nobel committee's recognition affirms that policymakers need to listen to the best available science and act upon it to avoid dangerous climate change," says Peter Frumhoff, a lead author of the IPCC's fourth assessment report on mitigation.
"The IPCC's exceptionally sober appraisal of the threat posed by global warming makes clear how serious this issue is," says Frumhoff, who is science and policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "The Nobel peace prize committee is giving climate change the attention that it deserves and Congress and the administration should do the same."
In attempt to combat climate change the European Union imposed greenhouse-gas caps in 2005 and is considering toughening them. Because of the large Republican minority in the Senate, Congress is not expected to pass any cap emission legislation until 2009. According to the Wall Street Journal, "While President Bush campaigned in 2000 on a pledge to seek limits on greenhouse gases, he dropped that after his election. President Clinton signed the Kyoto treaty for the U.S., but President Bush withdrew from participation."
Instead "the administration is negotiating with major developing nations -- India, China and Indonesia -- about joining a successor treaty to Kyoto, whose caps expire in 2012. Also, prodded by the Supreme Court, the Environmental Protection Agency is weighing regulations to curb carbon-dioxide emissions."
However, many corporations, including the Detroit automakers and energy utilities companies are joining the U.S. Climate Action Partnership which calls for a mandatory federal emissions limit in order to have some say on the final legislation that passes the hill, and avoid the situation of U.S. states such as California introducing their own legislation.
Asked Friday if the Nobel award will pressure the administration to adopt more of a more pro-active approach similar to the former Vice President's campaign, White House spokesman Tony Fratto replied: "No."
Related News Stories
Green Peace: Did Al Gore deserve a Nobel Prize for his work on global warming, Slate
2 Winners, and 2 Approaches to Spreading the Word on Climate, New York Times
What Gore's Nobel Prize Means for Political Climate, Wall Street Journal
Al Gore, UN Climate Change Panel Share Nobel Peace Prize, Democracy Now!
A Prize for Mr. Gore and Science, New York Times Editorial
Related Physics Today News Pick
UN Climate Change Panel share Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore (updated)
American Institute of Physics: Over the next few days Physics Today contributing editor Jennifer Oullette will be blogging the Industrial Physics Forum from Seattle, Washington. This year's forum, appropriately enough after last week's Nobel Peace prize award to Al Gore and the IPCC, is devoted to the energy challenge of reducing mankind's carbon dioxide emissions. MIT's Mildred Dresselhaus gave an introductory talk that called for "a Moore's Law" for energy efficiency, e.g. dramatic improvements in energy efficiency every 18 months. In one of her first postings, Oullette looks at the energy costs of transportation, and what manufacturers will have to build to wean consumers away from the gasoline engine.
Science News: One species—Homo sapiens—consumes nearly a quarter of Earth's natural productivity
Various: The Intergovernmental panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former Vice-President Al Gore have won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize:
"for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change"
"I would like to pay tribute to the scientific community, who are the winners of this award," says IPCC Chairman R. K. Pachauri. "The experts and scientists are the backbone of the IPCC and they provide the knowledge, which has contributed to the success of the IPCC...and this will energize the IPCC to do even more in the future."
"Indications of changes in the earth's future climate must be treated with the utmost seriousness," says a press release the Nobel Prize foundation, "and with the precautionary principle uppermost in our minds."
"What may be missed in the announcement of this award," says historian Spencer Weart, who has written a book on the history of the science of global warming, "is that only a fraction of the IPCC is the thousands of scientists who work on the main report...There are other reports that the IPCC issues that include practical advice on steps to reduce climate change." Moreover, he adds, "The IPCC reports are formed through consensus, not just by scientists, but also by the representatives of nearly every government in the world. All these groups have agreed, including countries such as China, that that there are economical steps that can be taken to avoid the risk of extreme climate events by 2100."
"In fact," says Weart, "the Nobel Peace Prize committee is behind the curve in relating this year's award to climate change. Recently a group of 3- and 4-star US generals and admirals issued a statement stating that global warming is a strategic threat to the United States. Global warming, along with all environmental degradation, is a threat to world peace. We can confidently assert that there will be more conflicts over resources such as water as the effects of climate change increase. This ties into some new scientific results in the last 10-15 years in which we've discovered that ancient civilizations have collapsed due to the environmental pressure of climate change."
This point is also amplified by the Foundation's press release: "By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 to the IPCC and Al Gore, the Norwegian Nobel Committee is seeking to contribute to a sharper focus on the processes and decisions that appear to be necessary to protect the world’s future climate, and thereby to reduce the threat to the security of mankind. Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man’s control."
Related Physics Today articles
Cause and Effect in Global Warming, January 2005
More Notes on Global Warming, May 2005
The Discovery of Rapid Climate Change, August 2003
A physicist proselytizes about countering global warming September 2007
Corporations embrace bottom-line global warming plan December 2006
Related web sites
2007 NobelPeace Prize site
Intergovernmental panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
Statement from Al Gore on winning the prize
Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth
Report: National Security and the Threat of Climate Change
The Discovery of Global Warming (Spencer Weart)
Related news stories
Gore and U.N. Panel Share Peace Prize, Washington Post 10/13
What Gore's Nobel Prize Means for Political Climate, Wall Street Journal 10/13
A Prize for Mr. Gore and Science, New York Times 10/13
Al Gore wins Nobel peace prize. And this time, no one can take it away from him, The Guardian 10/13
Al Gore, UN Climate Change Panel Share Nobel Peace Prize, DemocracyNow!
Gore says prize must spur action, BBC
Gore shares Nobel win with U.N. climate panell, Reuters
Gore and U.N. Panel Win Peace Prize, Associated Press
Al Gore and climate panel win Nobel Peace Prize, New Scientist
Scientific Panel and Al Gore Win Nobel Peace Prize for Work on Climate Change, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Why Al Gore deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, Salon.com (from yesterday, before the Nobel Prize announcement
Gore and UN share Nobel peace prizen, The Guardians
Gore and UN panel win Nobel prize, BBC
Gore and U.N. Panel Win Peace Prize for Climate Work, New York Times
Prize Caps Year of Highs for Gore, New York Times
Gore, U.N. Body Win Nobel Peace Prize, Washington Post
Climate Change a Global and Diplomatic Issue, NPR
Gore Not Likely to Run for President, NPR
Gore Wins Nobel Peace Prize, NPR
Panel: Gore Offered Ways to Curb Climate Change, NPR
Gore's Bid to Combat Global Warming Lauded, NPR
Economic Principals: Fifty years ago last week, the Soviet satellite known as Sputnik roared into orbit around the Earth, catching the United States completely by surprise. In its way, Sputnik was every bit as galvanizing an event as 9/11.
The real watershed came the next year, however, when Congress passed the National Defense Education Act. President Dwight Eisenhower signed the NDEA into law on September 2, 1958. School reform had been on the table for most of a decade. “Life-adjustment education” was still the fad those days in the nation’s public schools. The professional societies, especially, were poised to act.
What exactly was the $10 billion NDEA? To some, the NDEA was about curriculum reform: the Physical Science Study Committee’s high-school physics course (fifty-six films, a textbook and a slew of novel experiments); various innovative approaches to chemistry; the “new” math (set theory instead of the multiplication tables); the anthropologically-oriented Man: A Course of Study (Bushmen, Eskimos and all that).
In retrospect, however, the real payoff seems to have been the generation of 1958 a cohort of students for whom school became harder immediately, with advanced placement offerings proliferating and much more emphasis on math and science. Their sense of possibility shifted. What the GI bill had been to college education, the NDEA was to graduate study, with an emphasis on science and engineering.....
Science: Hobbyists who love the night sky are finding that their skills, and telescopes, are in demand with academic astronomers.
The New York Times: Sixty-two years after the victorious Allied leaders convened in this stately Prussian town to create the post-World War II world, 15 Nobel Prize laureates assembled here this week for another momentous task: saving the world from global warming.
Associated Press:
Gerhard Ertl of Germany won the 2007 Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for studies of chemical reactions on solid surfaces, which are key to understanding questions like why the ozone layer is thinning.
Ertl's research laid the foundation of modern surface chemistry, which has helped explain how fuel cells work, how catalytic converters clean up car exhaust and even why even why iron rusts, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
Ertl, who won the prize on his 71st birthday, told reporters that it ''is the best birthday present that you can give to somebody.''
''I am speechless,'' Ertl told The Associated Press from his office in Berlin. ''I was not counting on this.''
Related Web sites
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2007
German Wins Nobel Chemistry Prize, Associated Press
Nobel Prize in Chemistry Won by Gerhard Ertl, NPR
Telephone interview with Gerhard, Nobel Foundation.
Gerhard Ertl's web site
Various:
Albert Fert of the Université Paris-Sud, Orsay, France and Peter Grünberg of the Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany have won the 2007 Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery of giant magnetoresistance, or GMR for short. GMR is the process whereby a weak magnetic field, such as that of an oriented domain on the surface of a computer hard drive can, when the proper read head is brought nearby, trigger a large change in electrical resistance, thus “reading” the data vested in the magnetic orientation. This is the heart of modern hard drive technology and makes possible the immense hard-drive data storage industry. Earlier this year the two physicists won the Wolf Prize for the same research.
Fert and Gruenberg helped pioneer the making of semiconductor stacks consisting of alternating thin layers of magnetic and non-magnetic atoms needed to produce the GMR effect. GMR is a prominent example of how quantum effects (a large electrical response to a tiny magnetic input) come about through confinement (the atomic layers being so thin.); that is, atoms interact differently with each other when they are confined to a tiny volume or a thin plane.
All these magnetic interactions involve the spin of an electron. Spin is a quantum attribute that shouldn’t be associated too closely in the mind with the electron literally spinning (in the way that a top spins). Still more innovative technology can be expected through quantum effects depending on electrons’ spin. Most of the electronics industry is based on manipulating the charges of electrons moving through circuits. But the electrons’ spins might also be exploited to gain new control over data storage and manipulation. Spintronics is the general name for this branch of electronics.
Related Physics Today articles
Layered Magnetic Structures: History, Highlights, Applications, May 2001, page 31
Basic Research in the Information Technology Industry, Jul 2003
Magnetic Semiconductors Enable Efficient Electrical Spin Injection, April 2000, page 21
Physics Today, April 1995 (available November 1)
Related web sites
2007 Nobel Prize site
Wolf Prize announcement
Peter Gruenberg
Recent papers by Fert and Gruenberg
Related news stories
Magnetic Effect Nets a Nobel, Science
Physics of Hard Drives Wins Nobel, New York Times
Magnetic Effect Nets a Nobel, Science
Reuters
Physics Nobel Goes to German, Frenchman, Wired News
Disk technology takes Nobel Prize, BBC
Europeans Win Nobel Prize for Physics, NPR
A little magnetism wins physics Nobel, The Australian
ScienceNow: Science policy giant, financier and philanthropist William T. Golden of New York City and Olivebridge in Ulster County, New York, died on 7 October. He was 97.
Few figures have contributed more to American public science policy than Golden, whose long career of public service and charity helped shape both government research agencies and nonprofit science institutions. "He was a humanitarian scientist, … his love of science and its importance to humanity led to many gifts to all of us," says John Gibbons, science adviser to President William Clinton, calling Golden's contributions to U.S. science "almost immeasurable."
The London Times: The papers of one of Britain’s greatest scientists, which were lost for centuries and saved by the Royal Society in a £1 million sale last year, become available to read online today.
The innovative “digital folio” provides unprecedented public access to hundreds of pages of manuscript notes and minutes kept by Robert Hooke. The remarkable collection contains Hooke’s minutes of early meetings of the Royal Society, taken while he was curator of experiments and then secretary of the national academy of science, between 1661 and 1692.
They record many of the scientist’s own experiments and others conducted by figures such as Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Christopher Wren, as well as the disputes and rivalries that arose among the founding fathers of British science.
While most other Royal Society minutes from the period have been preserved in its archives, Hooke’s notes were thought to have been lost, most likely stolen. They were the only part of its records to be missing since it was established in 1660. Early last year, it emerged that the documents had been rediscovered in a cupboard at a house in Hampshire, and put up for auction. Though the Royal Society initially sought to have them returned as stolen, it eventually raised almost £1 million to buy them with a grant from the Wellcome Trust, Britain’s biggest biomedical science charity.
Related site
Hooke's papers
Science News: A long-lost text by the ancient Greek mathematician shows that he had begun to discover the principles of calculus.
The Guardian: Britain's worst nuclear accident, the Windscale fire in Cumbria, released twice as much radioactive debris as was previously thought. Scientists studying weather patterns and amounts of radioactive material distributed after the 1957 blaze say previous estimates have played down its deadly impact.
As a result of this re-evaluation, scientists say the fire - which sent a plume of caesium, iodine and polonium across Britain and northern Europe - may have caused several dozen more cases of cancer than had been estimated previously.
Foreign Policy: It’s been 50 years since Sputnik triggered a decades-long competition between the United States and the Soviet Union to rule the heavens. But if you thought the space race was over, think again. Foreign Policy magazine suggests that there are new contests for space dominance in racing to the Moon, putting humans on Mars, anti-satellite weapons creating a new global navigation system, and building the next generation of spacecraft. Ironically not only is Russia, China, and India involved in these dominance games, put so is private industry.
US News & World Report: Physicist Leon Lederman calls climate change a “menace” that, like the Soviet satellite, will spur more science
The Christian Science Monitor: Some say findings of human-caused global warming say more about politics than about science.
The New York Times: A group of scientists are upset about their inclusion in a film that makes the case for intelligent design.
The Christian Science Monitor: Engineers call it 'crowd farming.' If it works, you could help power city lights just by taking a stroll.
Various: Fifty years ago on October 4, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik-1, the first artificial satellite to reach orbit. As New York Times reporter John Noble Wilford reports "nothing would ever quite be the same--in geopolitics, in science and technology, in everyday life and the capacity of the human species."
As Carl Welser recounts, when he heard Sputnik-1 on the radio, there was no "beep" that is frequently played in the documentaries, just a few seconds of "hiss-hiss-hiss" as Sputnik passed over St. Louis, MI. Only when his radio operator turned on a beat frequency oscillator, which converted the hisses into a few fading beeps did the tell tale signal appear. It was a trick used by Morse code operators to send a signal signal using a simple continuous wave an extrmely long distance.
The simple message that amateur radio operators could pick up plunged the West, particularly the US, into a crisis of self-confidence over the capability of scientists and engineers. As historian Alex Roland, space policy analyst John M. Logsdon tell Wilford, if the first satellite had been launched by Americans, it would have merely confirmed their reputation for technological superiority and “there would probably not have been Apollo.” But as William J. Broad points out, from the start, the space race was an arms race.
Nearly all the major expansion in the physics community can be tied to this one event (see the statistical research reports at the American Institute of Physics) as Cornelia Dean recounts in When Science Suddenly Mattered, in Space and in Class. Gary Anthes at Computer World looks at the impact Sputnik has had on the computer industry, the vast computational demands of the space program helped dramatically reduce the cost of mainframe computers and provided large incentives to develop innovative integrated circuit designs. It also pushed the creation of Advanced Research Projects Agency, now known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Wilford reviews as part of his New York Times story some of the books and movies that recount the glory days of the Appollo program such as the new documentary "In the Shadow of the Moon" and Walter A. McDouagll's 1985 book "The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age." Reporter Claudia Dreifus also asks scientists and others who lived through it (and a few who were yet to be born) to reflect on what Sputnik meant to them
John Schwartz also looks in the New York Times at what the next fifty years might hold in terms of spaceflight, and Mike O'Sullivan at Voice of America attended a meeting of scientists and engineers at Caltech last week to talk about milestones of the past and future possibilities for space exploration.
Physics Today: The $500,000 fellowships were announced today by the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. This years awards include technologist Paul Rothemund whose research focuses on the fabrication of large molecules that reliably self-assemble into complex, arbitrary, programmable shapes; Los Alamos National Laboratory chemist My Hang Huynh who is working at the boundary of organic and inorganic chemistry to devise novel techniques for synthesizing highly energetic compounds. Technologist and co-founder of Squid Labs Saul Griffithwho designed while at MIT a unique membrane-based molding system that can produce a variety of common lenses from a single pair of flexible molding surfaces, which could be invaluable to rural communities around the world; University of Maryland environmental geographer Ruth DeFries who uses remotely sensed satellite imagery to explore the relationship between the Earth’s vegetative cover, human modifications of the landscape, and the biochemical processes that regulate the Earth’s habitability; University of Washington, Seattle, Prosthetic engineer Yoky Matsuoka, who creates sophisticated prosthetic devices and designs complementary rehabilitation strategies; Caltech molecular biologist Michael Elowitz who is designing artificial genetic “circuits,” first modeling them computationally and then introducing the elements in vivo to test their activity; and finally, Environmental Engineer Marc Edwards who is is playing a vital role in ensuring the safety of drinking water and in exposing deteriorating water-delivery infrastructure in America’s largest cities.
New York Times: TECHNOLOGY is its own nation whose citizens can work together amicably and profitably even when the geographic neighborhoods where they live are bloodily divided.
Consider the career of Mukhles Sowwan, who founded the Nanotechnology Research Laboratory at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem. The lab is the first nanotech center in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, according to Dr. Sowwan, a Palestinian who has a doctorate in solid-state nanophysics. He also believes that it is the first such lab at an Arab institution in the Middle East.
The lab pursues ground-breaking research under conditions that would bewilder most American and European technologists. But although Dr. Sowwan is its guiding spirit, it would not exist except for the generosity of European donors, the stubborn internationalism of a United Nations organization and the help of Dr. Sowwan’s mentor, who happens to be an Israeli physicist at Hebrew University in West Jerusalem.
Space.com: A physics Nobel Laureate issued a scathing critique today of NASA's manned spaceflight program and questioned the scientific usefulness of the International Space Station (ISS).
BBC: The British government's chief scientific advisor has set out a universal ethical code for scientists.
New York Times: At the invitation of North Korea, an international delegation of nuclear experts from Russia, China and the United States will travel to the North this week to inspect nuclear sites that are to be shut down, said Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill, the chief American envoy to North Korea.
The Washington Post: An Air Force B-52 bomber flew across the central United States last week with six cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads that were mistakenly attached to the airplane's wing, defense officials said yesterday.
Nature: In April, planetary scientist Alan Stern joined NASA as associate administrator for science, putting him in charge of the agency's $5.5-billion science budget. Nature's Alexandra Witze interviews Stern about how he will juggle more than 90 space missions and 3,000 grants with focuses ranging from Earth to the distant Universe.
The Register: The Pentagon's Airborne Laser (ABL) project has passed its penultimate technical milestone, according to makers Boeing. The ABL project is intended to deliver a fleet of aircraft armed with high-powered energy weapons. The idea is that such aircraft would patrol up to 400km from the launch sites of enemy nuclear missiles - off the coast of North Korea, say. Should the rogue state in question launch an atomic barrage, the ABLs would detect the hot exhaust plumes on infrared and focus their high-intensity energy beams on the vulnerable ballistic missiles while they were still packed with explosive rocket fuel - so blasting them to smithereens almost instantly, long before they could reach orbit.
The only thing now missing from the plane: the high energy beams.....
MSNBC: Since 2003 US military leaders repeatedly and urgently requested — and were denied — an energy beam weapon called the Active Denial System. The device, which is perched on a Humvee or a flatbed truck, has a range of 500 yards and uses directed-energy beams that can penetrate a few millimeters under the skin causing pain. As the soldiers train it on a crowd, the pain makes them disperse.
"I am convinced that the tragedy at Fallujah would not have occurred if an Active Denial System had been there," Air Force science advisor Gene McCall told Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to an e-mail obtained by Associated Press. The system should become "an immediate priority," McCall said.
However, the international red cross and other non-profit organizations, and other governments have a number of concerns related to the deployment of energy-based weapons, including whether such devices break the Geneva Convention on torture and the convention on conventional weapons. See also an earlier Physics Today news pick on laser blinding weapons being deployed to Iraq.
Laser blinding weapons in Iraq
Federation of American Scientists web site on the Convention on Conventional Weapons
convention on conventional weapons web site
Active Denial System wikipedia entry
LA Times: Paul B. MacCready, an accomplished meteorologist, a world-class glider pilot and a respected aeronautical engineer, has died. He was 81. The Caltech-trained scientist and inventor created the Gossamer Condor -- the first successful human-powered airplane--as well as other innovative aircraft.
MacCready died in his sleep at his Pasadena home Tuesday, according to an announcement from AeroVironment Inc., the Monrovia-based company he founded. The statement said he had been recently diagnosed with a serious ailment but the cause of death was not listed.
International Herald Tribune: Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists and engineers sued NASA and the California Institute of Technology on Thursday, challenging extensive new background checks that the space exploration center and other federal agencies began requiring in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles by 28 plaintiffs. Many have worked on such projects as the Mars rovers, the Galileo probe to Jupiter and the Cassini mission to Saturn, but none are involved in classified work, according to the suit. It seeks class-action status to represent similar JPL employees.
Caltech was sued because it manages JPL for NASA and employs its staff. The suit also named the U.S. Department of Commerce, which is involved in promulgating federal identification standards.
Slate.com: If economics can tell us something useful about crime, marriage, or carpooling—as I believe it can—then other academic disciplines should have something to tell us about economies. Last month, Science published an example that may turn out to be important. Two physicists, Cesar Hidalgo and Albert-László Barabási, and two economists, Bailey Klinger and Ricardo Hausmann, have been drawing unusual pictures of economic "space" that promise a deeper understanding of the biggest question in economics: why poor countries are poor.
Financial Times: Victoria Kim reports that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is helping to fund a new initiative to relocate more than 150 Iraqi scholars who are facing persecution. The foundation will provide $5m (£2.5m) for fellowships to Iraqi scholars trying to continue their work at institutions in other countries, notably Jordan, matching funds provided by the US Congress. The money will be administered by the Scholar Rescue Fund, an organisation founded in 2002 by Wall Street investors that helps academics in conflict zones.
Iraq is "the closest thing that any of us have seen to the Holocaust in terms of attacks on science and learning", said Allan Goodman, president and chief executive of the non-profit International Institute of Education, which administers the fund.
"It is not even clear who is doing it," said Dr Jarecki, the fund's chairman.
NPR: Even without big-name makers of electric cars, there are some big names driving them: Calif. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and George Clooney both bought the all-electric Roadster sports car. It goes from zero to 60 miles per hour in four seconds, and charges from a household plug.
The New York Times: Gino Segre followed the family tradition of becoming a physicist, but then turned to writing science history for a broader audience.
Salon.com: Turkish-American physicist Taner Edis explains why science in Muslim lands remains stuck in the past -- and why the Golden Age of Mesopotamia wasn't so golden after all.
Continue reading "The religious state of Islamic science" »
Miami Herald: The staff rebellion at the National Hurricane Center grew dramatically, with nearly two dozen employees calling for the departure of director Bill Proenza.
Canoe.ca: A half century after American scientist Paul Doty joined colleagues from around the world in a small Nova Scotia village to discuss the threat of nuclear war, he makes a grim prediction that suggests the risk of such a menacing attack is still very real today. Doty came to Pugwash in the summer of 1957, one of 22 scientists invited by a local-born philanthropist to discuss the dangers posed by nuclear weapons during the height of the Cold War.
The Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs will return to the community this weekend to mark its anniversary, bringing together two dozen scientists, diplomats and former military personnel.
Various: As though their knowledge of the quantum secrets came with the power of prophecy, some three dozen of Europe’s best physicists ended their 1932 meeting in Copenhagen with a parody of Goethe’s “Faust.” Physicist Gino Segrè's new book, Faust in Copenhagen forms the basis of a New York Times review by George Johnson. Joscelyn Jurich in her review for the San Francisco Chronicle, looks in more detail at the links between Fraust and physics in the 1930s.
New York Times: The Senate passed a broad energy bill late Thursday that would, among other things, require the first big increase in fuel mileage requirements for passenger cars in more than two decades.
The vote, 65 to 27, was a major defeat for car manufacturers, which had fought for a much smaller increase in fuel economy standards and is expected to keep fighting as the House takes up the issue
New York Times: The next few days will see the second full test of the controversial US ballistic missile system which has been delayed for months because of glitches in the navigation software. A failure of the test may impact the democrat-controlled Congresses willingness to fund the project.
The Washington Post: The Smithsonian Institution toned down an exhibit on climate change in the Arctic for fear of angering Congress and the Bush administration, says a former administrator at the museum.
USA Today: In a span of seven years, Loretta Weathers moved from a plasma physics laboratory at MIT to a federal courtroom, trading long days of crunching data for the adrenalin rush of high-stakes litigation.
ScienceNow: French scientists are feeling the winds of change after yesterday's election of conservative leader Nicolas Sarkozy as the country's new president. Sarkozy has announced reform plans--including a shake-up of the higher education system as early as this summer--which are opposed by trade unions and other groups. But some researchers say Sarkozy's recipe is just what French science needs.
Various: Coal is so cheap and so widely available that its increased use is inevitable, for example, more than 70% of China's energy needs comes from coal.
But Coal is a major source of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming and other health effects, caused by releasing toxic materials and radioactive gases into the atmosphere. The environmental damage has altered landscapes and caused deaths (26 per 50,000 of population).
Massive coal burning began with England's industrial revolution. As part of a special report NPR visits Coalbrookdale, the cradle of the industrial revolution and where the origins of coal power are on display. The story of coal is brought up to date in China. China's seemingly unstoppable use of coal will soon reach a point in which it may have to import coal from other countries says the China Daily, despite holding the largest coal reserves on the planet.
As the fuel source is dirty there is great interest in finding a way to separating the carbon dioxide and sequestering it says the New York Times. Adds the paper "This could turn out to be one of the great engineering challenges of the century." Many engineers are working on "clean coal" technologies such as making the plant plants more efficient, and by storing the CO2 produced underground but who will be the first to implement such a plant? Europe or the US?
Clean coal: The New York Times
NPR visits Coalbrookdale
NPR visits a coal mine in China
Coal imports: The China Daily
Storing the CO2 produced underground: World Coal Institute
The clean coal roadmap
Europe's Framework 7 clean coal program
US Department of Energy clean coal program
NPR: As Congress continues to prepare legislation related to the American Competitiveness Initiative, a call to increase the number of graduates with science and engineering skills in the US to compete in the global economy, a report on NPR suggest that the majority of engineering graduates in India and China are so poor in terms of skills, that they cannot get employment. In fact, according to NPR's Vivek Wadhwa a US skills shortage isn't the reason for so many companies are exporting science and technology jobs overseas, cheap labor is.
Washington Post: NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin held an unusual meeting with the staff of the inspector general who oversees his agency and then ordered that video recordings of the meeting be destroyed, a House panel said yesterday.
In a letter to Griffin, the chairman of the Science and Technology subcommittee on investigations and oversight demanded an explanation from the NASA administrator and accused him of improperly trying to influence the watchdog office's decisions on what it should investigate.
In addition, the letter from Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.) said the order to destroy the meeting tapes, which was issued by NASA's chief of staff, "appears on its face to be nothing less than the destruction of evidence."
In a response yesterday, NASA spokesman David Mould said that the meeting was proper, and was a way for Griffin to discuss outstanding issues with the inspector general's staff and to express support for a strong watchdog office
Nature: Rapid development is seeing carbon dioxide levels soar.
The Christian Science Monitor: Public awareness about climate change is growing; 83 percent of Americans now call it a 'serious' problem.
Columbus Ledger-Enquirer: The United States is losing its lead in high-energy physics, a field of science it's dominated since the 1930s.
Scientists say Europe is now in the vanguard of a worldwide search to discover the deepest secrets that Mother Nature hides in bits and pieces of atoms.
The New York Times: For decades, undergraduate women have been moving in ever greater numbers into science and engineering departments at American universities. Yet even as they approach or exceed enrollment parity in mathematics, biology and other fields, there is one area in which their presence relative to men is static or even shrinking: computer science.
The New York Times: For the second time in a month, private consultants to the government are warning that human-driven warming of the climate poses risks to the national security of the United States.
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