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The federal government should create a multiagency advanced manufacturing initiative to help US industry regain its competitiveness, says a new report by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). The program should be funded at $500 million during the first year, and increase to $1 billion by the fourth year.

The initiative would be coordinated by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, with the Departments of Energy, Commerce, and Defense as the major federal participants, the PCAST report recommends. Agencies would assist US industry and universities with applied research on new manufacturing technologies and design methodologies. The proposal calls for formation of public–private partnerships to transfer technologies at the pre-commercial stage. Small manufacturers would have access to shared R&D facilities under the plan.

After a briefing on the report's major findings and recommendations, PCAST unanimously approved the report at a 19 May meeting.

"We were quite shocked to see how quickly [manufacturing] jobs have disappeared with globalization," said Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google who cochaired the PCAST subcommittee that wrote the report. Without government intervention, he said, job losses "will continue apace." During a 19 May presentation of the report's major findings and recommendations, PCAST cochair Eric Lander, an MIT biologist, observed that the US trade deficit in advanced technology manufactured products has increased from $17 billion in 2003 to $81 billion in 2010. Prior to 2000, the US had always run a trade surplus in those goods.

"We've been very careful to ensure that what we recommend does not constitute industrial policy," said subcommittee cochair Shirley Ann Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "But there are cases when individual companies cannot justify the investments that are required to fully develop many important new technologies," and where private investments need to be complemented by public ones.

In determining the projects the initiative will fund, OSTP managers should consider the potential for "transformative impact," the presenters said. Specifically, a project should have a high probability of creating jobs, of providing a competitive advantage to the US, and of addressing a "market failure," where private investment is unavailable. Candidate technologies may include clean energy, pharmaceuticals, and advanced materials, said PCAST member Chad Mirkin, a Northwestern University professor. "We need to create ways of moving these types of discoveries past the valley of death," Mirkin said, a reference to the gap in financing that startup companies often face in the early stages of bringing a new technology to the market.

A model for the proposed manufacturing initiative was the government–industry collaboration known as the SEMATECH (Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology), the consortium created in 1987 by 14 US-based semiconductor manufacturers to overcome common manufacturing problems, said PCAST member Richard Levin, president of Yale University. That collaboration was widely seen as saving the US semiconductor industry. The $500 million that SEMATECH received in federal funding over a five-year period was matched by the industry partners. Similar cost-sharing would be expected from the initiative's manufacturer members.

The PCAST report also urges that the US corporate rate be lowered from its current 35% to bring it into line with the 27% average tax rate of other developed nations. It calls for the R&D tax credit to be made permanent, and it endorsed the continuation of the 10-year doubling of the budgets of NSF, NIST, and the Department of Energy's basic research program. More generally, the PCAST recommends improving US science and mathematics education and raising the limit on the number of highly skilled foreigners who are allowed to work in the US.

Pending minor editing, the report is to be delivered to President Obama and then released publicly. Although PCAST, like other advisory committees, is required to make all materials it considers and discusses publicly available, OSTP declined to provide a copy of the report to Physics Today. An OSTP spokesman said the agency's lawyers were reviewing whether public release is mandated.

David Kramer

As NASA grapples with more cost overruns on the James Webb Space Telescope and an ever-decreasing budget, planning for the next generation of cheaper and faster planetary missions through NASA's Discovery Program continues. NASA has selected three projects to receive $3 million each for preliminary design studies:

• Geophysical Monitoring Station (GEMS) would study the structure and composition of the interior of Mars. The principal investigator is Bruce Banerdt of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
• Titan Mare Explorer (TiME) would provide the first direct exploration of an ocean environment beyond Earth by landing in, and floating on, a large methane–ethane sea on Saturn's moon Titan. Ellen Stofan of Proxemy Research Inc in Gaithersburg, Maryland, is the principal investigator, and Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, will manage the project.
• Comet Hopper would study cometary evolution by landing on a comet multiple times and observing its changes as it interacts with the Sun. University of Maryland professor Jessica Sunshine is the principal investigator. She will be supported by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

"This is high science return at a price that's right," said Jim Green, director of NASA's planetary science division in Washington. "The selected studies clearly demonstrate a new era with missions that all touch their targets to perform unique and exciting science."

Next year NASA will select one of the three projects to receive up to $425 million (excluding launch costs) for the spacecraft to be built and launched by 2016.

Along with the three mission projects, NASA also announced preliminary funding of several experimental technology demonstrators:

• Primitive Material Explorer (PriME) would develop a mass spectrometer that would provide highly precise measurements of the chemical composition of a comet and explore the objects' role in delivering volatiles to Earth. Anita Cochran of the University of Texas at Austin is the principal investigator.
• Whipple is designed to develop and validate a technique called blind occultation that could lead to the discovery of various celestial objects in the outer solar system. Charles Alcock of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the principal investigator.
• The NEOCam project would develop a telescope to study the origin and evolution of near-Earth objects and the present risk of Earth impact. It would generate a catalog of objects and accurate infrared measurements to provide a better understanding of small bodies that cross our planet's orbit. Amy Mainzer of JPL is the principal investigator.

Over the next several years, additional funding will depend on how those proposals progress in terms of flight readiness.

Paul Guinnessy

Steve Corneliussen's topics this week:

• The growing public discussion about the reportClimate Shift: Clear Vision for the Next Decade of Public Debate
  
• Newt Gingrich's conservative support for science funding
  
• A prominent biodiversity scientist's perspective on environmentalism, climate and energy
  
• The nuclear industry's future prompts discouraging views in the New York Times
  
• Disagreement between Wall Street Journal opinion writers and a teachers' union leader on education reform
  

Matthew Nisbet's controversial climate report

As many in the physics community know, Matthew C. Nisbet holds faculty positions in both communication and environmental science at American University in Washington, DC. Here's a collage of excerpts from the already voluminous public discussion, mainly online so far, of his new report, Climate Shift: Clear Vision for the Next Decade of Public Debate.

"So now greens are in the post-mortem stage, and, not shockingly, it's a sensitive subject," wrote Bradford Plumer, an associate editor at the New Republic, in the 21 April article "Blame Game: Has the green movement been a miserable flop?" Plumer continued:

Matthew Nisbet ... [has] released a hefty 84-page report trying to figure out why climate activism flopped so miserably in the past few years. Nisbet's report is already causing controversy: Among other things, he argues that, contrary to popular belief, greens weren't badly outspent by industry groups and that media coverage of climate science wasn't really a problem.

Ezra Klein's Washington Post blog quoted Plumer, and then said of Nisbet's report, "Reading through it, I started to wonder if there was another option worth considering. Maybe none of the theories about what went wrong are correct. It's quite possible that climate activists basically did a competent job: After all, they did get a big, complicated bill to the 20-yard-line in a legislative body that rarely passes big, complicated bills—and they just got unlucky."

Nature's 21 April editorial "Home truths: A new report offers useful insight into the continuing stalemate over global warming" declared that the Nisbet report "shines light on some uncomfortable truths" and "should be essential reading for anyone with a passing interest in the climate-change debate." The editors emphasize that it "effectively dismantles three of the most common reasons given by those who have tried, and failed, to garner widespread support for policies to restrict greenhouse gases." The editors continued:

First—the failure of the US Senate to pass a cap-and-trade bill in 2010 cannot be blamed directly on the financial lobbying muscle of the conservative movement and its allies in industry. In 2009, the report says, although a network of prominent opponents of cap and trade, including ExxonMobil and Koch Industries, spent a total of US$272 million lobbying policy-makers, environmental groups in favour of cap and trade mobilized $229 million from companies such as General Electric and other supporters to lobby for environmental issues. Indeed, the effort to pass cap and trade, Nisbet notes, "may have been the best-financed political cause in American history".

Second—most of the mainstream media coverage of climate change gets it right. During 2009 and 2010, Nisbet writes, around nine out of ten news and opinion articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN's online site reflected the consensus scientific position. The Wall Street Journal regularly presented the opposite view in its opinion pages, but eight out of ten news items still backed the science.

Third—conservative media outlets such as Fox News and controversies such as the coverage of e-mails hacked from the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom have a minimal impact on public attitudes to climate change, because such influences tend to only reinforce the views of those who already hold doubts.

The failure of cap and trade in the United States, Nisbet concludes, was not down to poor communication, but was due to framing the issue of greenhouse-gas emissions as a problem that could be solved by a specific policy. More useful, he says, would be to present climate change as an issue that needs to be addressed at many levels, similar to public health or poverty. Those, of course, are far from ideal models—but we live in far from ideal times.

At the New York Times's Dot Earth blog, Andrew Revkin has now offered two postings about the report and the discussion surrounding it.

He begins the first posting, "Beyond the Climate Blame Game," by reporting that on "the tiny patch of American public discourse reserved for the global warming debate ... a week of blogitation over a sprawling report examining failed efforts to pass a climate bill has started to give way to constructive discussion." Revkin explains that Nisbet's report "explores who had the biggest advantage—in money and media spin—in the fight over a cap-and-trade climate bill, along with cultural issues, like the deep liberal tilt among scientists, that flavor how such battles are waged." He links to several other blog discussions, quotes the views of several formal reviewers, mainly from academe, and offers what he calls "a few overarching observations about the report, the fate of the climate bill, American attitudes on energy and the influence of environmental and anti-regulatory forces in Washington."

Revkin says that his second posting, "Two Views of Climate Cause and Effect," is "for anyone wishing to dig in deeper on missteps and next steps on the climate challenge." He offers replies received from Nisbet and from Joe Romm of the Climate Progress blog, whom Revkin calls "one of Nisbet's staunchest critics." The replies address questions from Revkin "related to the overall question of influence, effort and outcomes after nearly a decade aimed at producing a comprehensive climate bill centered on carbon trading."

Conservatives for science funding, cont.

As reported in January, the conservative columnist George F. Will, addressing kindred spirits concerning the federal budget, cited the National Academies' Gathering Storm reports and declared that federally funded research has become "what canals and roads once were—a prerequisite for long-term economic vitality." Shortly later he wrote in support of STEM education. Now a Wall Street Journal columnist, David Wessel, has likened the conservative Newt Gingrich to President Obama when it comes to support for science.

Wessel's 28 April column, headlined "Republicans Split Over Research Spending," reports that Gingrich is accusing Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), "chairman of the House Budget Committee and leader of the quest to shrink government . . . of a big mistake: Spending too little on medical and scientific research." He quotes Gingrich on the lack of wisdom in scanting science: "It's essentially like saying I want to save money on your car [so] we're not going to change the oil. And for about a year I can get away with it, then the engine will freeze, and we have to change the engine." Wessel emphasizes: "In making the case for more government investment in research, [Gingrich] sounds like Barack Obama."

Wessel joins in with his own support as well when he asks readers to "ponder these facts":

Federal spending on payments for individuals (everything from housing subsidies to health care) has doubled over the past 30 years, as a share of the economy. Defense spending fell when the Cold War ended, but has been climbing for a decade.

Yet everything else—including all spending intended to pay off in the future—has been flat, setting aside the temporary Obama fiscal stimulus. Of the $3.5 trillion the federal government spent in 2010, only 1.6% went to non-defense physical capital, R&D, education and training, the White House budget office says. That's half the size of the share for this spending in the early 1970s.

Wessel also invokes business leaders' support of federal science funding:

Many corporate executives side with Messrs. Gingrich and Obama. Along with calling for lower taxes and less regulation, they've been arguing—to quote a recent statement signed by the Business Roundtable, a group of CEOs—for "federal investment to prepare our children with world-class educations and to support the scientific and technology research and innovation infrastructure that enable the private sector to create jobs."

The columnist sums things up this way: "It's a reminder that in the debate over government-spending priorities, the differences aren't exclusively between the two parties, but sometimes within them."

Jesse Ausubel's environmental outlook

Please consider the environmental reconnaissance projects that Jesse H. Ausubel has contributed or helped contribute to biodiversity science, and then please consider his outlook on environmentalism—including energy and climate—overall. The four projects:

1. The Census of Marine Life has completed a ten-year investigation of diversity, distribution, and abundance of marine life.
2. The International Barcode of Life project has collected more than a million specimens and has defined the DNA bar codes for more than 95 732 species.
3. Edward O. Wilson's Encyclopedia of Life calls itself a "global partnership between the scientific community and the general public" with the goal of making "freely available to anyone knowledge about all the world's organisms."
4. The Deep Carbon Observatory is a "multidisciplinary, international initiative dedicated to achieving a transformational understanding of Earth's deep carbon cycle"; it "deploys ships to drill deep holes, runs a fleet of helicopters to install instruments on every volcano on earth, and develops new apparatus to test the deep physics and chemistry of carbon."

Ausubel, of Rockefeller University, serves as vice president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation of New York, and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Nicholas Wade profiled him on the front page of this week's Science Times section in the New York Times.

Ausubel, Wade reports, believes that technology will, in general, protect rather than harm the environment. Wade continues:

Over the long run, [Ausubel] notes, the economy requires more efficient forms of energy, and these are inherently sparing of the environment. Cities used to use wood for heat and hay for transport fuel. But the required volumes of wood and horse feed soon led to more compact fuels like coal and oil.

Coal in turn is giving way to natural gas in a process that Mr. Ausubel calls decarbonization, the replacement of carbon-rich fuels with hydrogen-rich ones. The ultimate fuel source, in his view, is nuclear power, with reactors set to produce electricity by day and hydrogen, the fuel for battery-powered cars, by night. He sees little that might thwart the mighty process of decarbonization, even given setbacks like Japan's nuclear crisis. "The energy system absorbs shocks even as big as Fukushima," he says.

As a program officer with the National Academy of Sciences, Mr. Ausubel worked with senior scientists who had broad experience in running international environmental programs. He was involved in planning the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meeting but has viewed the panel's subsequent reports with reserve. Climate change went from being a small to a major issue. "And then the expected happened," he said. "Opportunists flowed in. By 1992 I stopped wanting to go to climate meetings."

Because of decarbonization, Mr. Ausubel believes that the growth of carbon dioxide emissions will be limited. "The computer models of the climate system aren't good enough and never will be. I tend not to be frightened because I think the natural evolution of the energy system is away from carbon," he said.

Wade explains that it was Ausubel's "belief that technology is generally relieving the pressure on the terrestrial environment that led to his interest in marine life" and the oceans—because they seemed to be being left under pressure. When Ausubel started the Deep Carbon Observatory in 2009, Wade writes, he had long been interested in the idea "that oil and gas are produced by deep-earth microbes feeding on natural sources of methane," which led to the idea "that oil wells might be naturally replenished from vast sources of carbon deep in the planet." This line of thinking originated with the Cornell University physicist Thomas Gold.

Wade continues:

Whether Dr. Gold's ideas are correct, the behavior of carbon in the deep earth is an issue of considerable scientific moment. The deep earth is full of microbes that lead a largely independent existence from those on the surface. This dark world, flourishing but largely unknown, could have been the origin of life on earth and may influence it in many other ways. There is reason to think the deep earth contains hidden reservoirs of carbon—meteorites of the type that formed the primitive earth are 3 percent carbon, but the detectable abundance of carbon is only 0.1 percent. Discovery of a hidden carbon reservoir in the deep earth, especially if it is connected with the origins of oil and gas, could change estimates of energy supplies.

At the end of the profile, Wade sums up by noting that Ausubel "does not belong to the Jeremiah school of environmentalists who prophesy imminent doom unless their words are heeded." He quotes Ausubel: "The credibility of the environmental movement as a whole is less than its members wish it to be, and a lot of that has come from overdoing it on various issues."

New York Times sees nuclear slowdown

Under the headline "Despite Bipartisan Support, Nuclear Reactor Projects Falter," the New York Times reports that six years after Congress authorized
$17.5 billion in loan guarantees for new reactors, market conditions and the Fukushima Daiichi disaster have stalled the nuclear industry, and nearly half of the fund remains unclaimed.

"Even supporters of the technology," writes Matthew Wald, "doubt that new projects will surface any time soon to replace those that have been all but abandoned." He cites Neil Wilmshurst, a vice president of the Electric Power Research Institute, who "said the continued depressed price of natural gas had clouded the economics of new reactors" and "predicted that construction activity would 'go quiet' for two to five years." Wald reports that of "the four nuclear reactor construction projects that the Energy Department identified in 2009 as the most deserving for the loans, two have lost major partners and seem unlikely to recover soon."

The situation also involves the politics of carbon dioxide emissions, Wald says:

The initial $17.5 billion was approved during the Bush administration, but President Obama has also embraced the idea of marrying nuclear power to solar, wind and "clean coal" to reach his administration's goal of generating 80 percent of American electricity from those sources by 2035. Mr. Obama's call for new loan guarantees came when the administration was seeking Republican votes in the Senate for a limit on carbon dioxide emissions, but he has stuck with the loan guarantees even after prospects for such legislation died after last fall's midterm elections.

Wald does report some optimism in the federal government:

Officials at the Energy Department, which administers the loans, said they were confident that other developers would come forward and apply for the guarantees. Jonathan M. Silver, the executive director of the loan programs office, said, "There is a significant queue of nuclear power plants in house that we will and are working on."

"They may just go forward under a different time frame," he said, but he declined to estimate how many years it would be before the government could reach its goal of providing loan guarantees to six to eight reactor projects.

Mr. Silver said that by the time a reactor could be finished and brought on line, market factors might be more in the industry's favor. "There are so many variables in this equation, taking a snapshot may be less relevant than watching the whole movie," he said.

And near the end, Wald paraphrases Michael J. Wallace, a former nuclear industry executive: "With a carbon tax no longer appearing likely, he said a new kind of help, like a federal 'clean energy' standard that would set a quota for nuclear and renewable electricity, might be needed."

But overall, Wald conveys doubt about nuclear industry prospects.

Randi Weingarten's hard month at the Wall Street Journal

Followers of—and participants in—the education wars might want to know that Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers since 2008, has been having a hard time on the Wall Street Journal opinion page.

In a 26 March "Weekend Interview" article under the headline "Weingarten for the Union Defense," a member of the WSJ's editorial board presented her as a hard-core opponent of good sense. He noted that recent documentaries have "highlighted how teachers unions block or stifle education reforms to the detriment of the low-income minority kids who populate the nation's worst schools." He charged that donations from the unions "go overwhelmingly to Democrats, and the role that member dues play in the wider liberal movement can be seen in teachers union support for everything from abortion rights to single-payer health care to statehood for Washington, D.C." He wrote:

And so it goes. Ms. Weingarten insists that teachers unions are agents of change, not defenders of the status quo. But in the next breath she shoots down suggestions for changes—vouchers, charter schools, differential teacher pay and so on—that have become important parts of the reform conversation. She seems to conceive of her job as the one William F. Buckley Jr. ascribed to conservatives in the 1950s: To stand athwart history yelling "Stop!"

A few days later, two letters to the editor appeared. The shorter letter complimented "the vast majority of America's teachers [as] both highly competent and highly dedicated." The longer letter began, "Jason L. Riley's 'The Weekend Interview With Randi Weingarten' (March 26) is truly frightening. As long as Ms. Weingarten leads the teachers union and speaks for any sizeable cross-section of teachers, our public education system will get worse before it gets better."

Early this week Weingarten asserted her own voice directly, via an op-ed under the headline "Markets Aren't the Education Solution." Though "market-based reforms" have been "promoted by the so-called reformers in the United States," she wrote, they have little in common with policies in educationally successful nations. She charged that "the evidence clearly shows that a heavy reliance on charter schools, performance pay, overuse of standardized tests and ignoring poverty won't adequately prepare our children for college, career and life."

She added: "With supreme certainty and blind zeal, market-based reformers are doubling down on an agenda that has failed to produce the transforming gains they promised. They disparage and delegitimize any gains that traditional public schools as well as their teachers (and their unions) have delivered for kids." She cited a Stanford University study's discouraging findings on charter schools and a Vanderbilt University study's discouraging findings on merit pay. She endorsed "countries like Finland, Singapore and South Korea," which "emphasize teacher preparation, mentoring and collaboration" and "revere and respect their teachers" rather than "demonize them." In a comment sure to gather special notice from some of the WSJ's opinion-page readers, she expressed admiration for countries that "offset the effects of poverty through on-site wraparound services such as medical and dental care and counseling" in public schools.

A few days later, four letters appeared under the headline "Accountability Is the Crux of Serious School Reform." All four criticized Weingarten.

The first came from Joel Klein, who served as chancellor of New York City public schools from 2002 to 2010. He wrote, in part:

Top-performing countries revere teachers because they get great results (that's why they're top performing). Those countries recruit teachers from the top of their graduating classes, insist on excellence and don't protect underperformers. America does precisely the opposite, largely recruiting from the bottom half of our graduates and protecting even the worst of them. . . . As long as unions continue to protect low-performing teachers, the solution for America's families is to give them choices so they can escape dead-end schools staffed by poor teachers.

The other three complete Weingarten's hard month at the WSJ. Here is one excerpt apiece:

1. "Let's examine why U.S. spending on elementary and secondary schools is 50% more than in Finland and Korea—two countries which Ms. Weingarten claims have things to teach us—while our kids are learning less."
2. "The real demon is the union-backed tenure system which keeps bad teachers in the classroom."
3. "Instead of a one-scale-fits-all pay approach, teachers, at least the good ones, should benefit from a more competitive labor market in which school administrators could offer salaries commensurate with expected student performance rather than being determined by an arbitrary salary scale."

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.

• Continued discussion of the developing world's interest in open access
• Contrasting views on courts and carbon dioxide, as seen in a pair of commentaries
• A case study of alarmism in the news: a Washington Post front-page story
• Reactor cancellations raising doubts about new nuclear plants, as seen in three national newspapers
• Continued discussion of the potential role of science and science-mindedness in Egypt's future

SciDev.net, Thomas Jefferson, and open access to new knowledge

Please indulge some long-view historical context for a report that builds on last week's posting "Open access, citation statistics, and the spread of knowledge."

It's the spread-of-knowledge dimension that calls to mind how, in 1809, the scientist who presided over the physicist Benjamin Franklin's American Philosophical Society wrote a letter that historians remember under the name "the republic of science." The letter's author was just completing his second term in his other office, the US presidency. In that capacity, Thomas Jefferson was writing to lament a disruptive intrusion by politics into the work of the international science enterprise—the republic of science.

Jefferson cited "the nature of the correspondence which is carried on between societies instituted for the benevolent purpose of communicating to all parts of the world whatever useful is discovered in any one of them." He continued:

These societies are always in peace, however their nations may be at war. Like the republic of letters, they form a great fraternity spreading over the whole earth, and their correspondence is never interrupted by any civilized nation. Vaccination has been a late and remarkable instance of the liberal diffusion of a blessing newly discovered. It is really painful, it is mortifying, to be obliged to note these things, which are known to every one who knows any thing, and felt with approbation by every one who has any feeling.

David Dickson serves as director of the developing world's SciDev.net, an organization instituted, as Jefferson might have put it, for the benevolent purpose of communicating to all parts of the world whatever useful is discovered by scientists anywhere. In a 15 April commentary headlined "Open access: not just about citations," Dickson has engaged the recurring debate—reported on last week—about the relationship between open access and citation statistics. He has discerned in that debate a potential for interruption to the international spread of new knowledge—calling to mind Jefferson's letter, even if Dickson probably doesn't find it "mortifying to be obliged to note" the problem, and even though the impediment is economics, not politics.

Dickson's commentary's thumbnail encapsulation says, "Focusing on the 'citation advantage' of open access misses its value in getting science information in the hands of those who need it."

He begins by declaring that, thanks to the economics of scientific publishing, "support in the scientific community for the principle OA [open access] represents—that all scientific publications should be made freely available, at least in electronic form—has outstripped individual scientists' willingness to put that principle into practice." He calls authors' fees "a particular obstacle for scientists in developing countries."

This economic disincentive for OA works with the one discussed last week. As Dickson now puts it, "most scientists still prefer, where possible, to publish in established journals with high citation rates—a proxy for quality of scientific publications." He worries that the "study published last month by Philip Davis of Cornell University ... has been widely interpreted as throwing OA into further doubt, by questioning what is generally perceived as a major benefit of OA publishing—the 'OA citation advantage.'" He worries that "even by 2020, only about one quarter of scientific articles will be freely accessible."

Dickson worries too about the effect of the press release for the Davis study. The headline proclaimed, "Paid access to journal articles not a significant barrier for scientists." The thumbnail summary said, "New research paper ... shows that scientists have adequate access to paid journal content since free access to journal articles does not increase their citations."

And there's the problem. There's the potential, as Dickson sees it, for harm to "the correspondence which is carried on between societies instituted for the benevolent purpose of communicating to all parts of the world whatever useful is discovered in any one of them." The debate that these results have triggered, writes Dickson, "sidesteps consideration of the full value of OA journals" to the spread of new knowledge. He continues:

This lies not merely in how they benefit science specialists, but also in making scientific research widely available to those who can neither afford high subscription rates for specialist journals, nor get access to scientific libraries—but whose work or personal interest depend on having access to the global pool of scientific knowledge....

Those who benefit from OA include many scientists in the developing world, where most university and research institution libraries remain heavily underfunded.

Then there are students, who are equally keen to follow new scientific developments. And finally there are all those who put scientific research to practical use—including members of the public, as well as professional groups such as healthcare workers.

As Davis has said, "there are many benefits to the free access of scientific information"—a point long argued by OA advocates, even if a citation advantage may not prove to be one of them.

To bolster his argument, Dickson cites the recent PLoS Medicine article "Towards Open and Equitable Access to Research and Knowledge for Development." It argues that "the sharing of knowledge discovery across borders and the building of a global knowledge commons is increasingly important for solving problems that we all face." He agrees with it that "standards for assessing journal quality and relevance are generally based on 'Northern' values that often ignore development needs" and marginalize local science.

Dickson declares in conclusion that putting the "social value of science into measurable terms is much more difficult than the relatively simple calculations of citation rates."

WSJ v. NYT on American Electric Power v. Connecticut

Though it's not news that opinion in the Wall Street Journal often mismatches opinion in the New York Times, sharply diverging views might merit reporting from the two papers concerning this week's US Supreme Court case American Electric Power v. Connecticut.

Plaintiffs including several states and New York City are suing corporations responsible for a quarter of the electric power industry's carbon dioxide emissions. They seek abatement of what they believe are contributions to global warming.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, two former Justice Department officials from the George H. W. Bush administration disapprove of the suit. David B. Rivkin Jr and Lee A. Casey assert that the "rank absurdity of plaintiffs' claims should be obvious to the justices, who should rule decisively that the federal courts do not possess constitutional jurisdiction over climate change cases."

The two call the suit political—and have filed an amicus brief. They disbelieve the plaintiffs' fundamental motivation. Pressing often-heard claims of scientific authority, they write:

It is difficult to imagine a subject less susceptible to judicial resolution. Climate change is a well-established and natural phenomenon. The Earth's climate has changed dramatically over time. In the 19th century, for example, the northern hemisphere began to emerge from a period of global cooling known as the Little Ice Age. The extent to which man-made emissions like carbon dioxide may contribute to this process of periodic change, and to more recent warming trends, remains unclear.

What is clear is that the entire human population produces carbon emissions, and industrialized economies have done so on a significant scale since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution more than two centuries ago. It is impossible to determine whether emissions by any particular power plant—or US electricity production as a whole—have affected warming trends and, if so, how. Nor can we surmise what party is responsible in whole or in part for the particular plaintiffs' alleged injuries. The law requires more than a guess.

Rivkin and Casey cite a "fundamental reason why these lawsuits must be dismissed: Federal courts can only decide cases where the complaining parties have actually been injured by the defendants' own actions and an effective remedy can be framed in a judicial order."

But a New York Times editorial agrees with a lower court:

As the Second Circuit writes, [the plaintiffs] "may seek their remedies under the federal common law," including made by justices. The Supreme Court has upheld a lawsuit preventing the discharge of sewage that made the Mississippi River unfit. It has upheld limits of noxious emissions of sulfur from copper foundries in Tennessee that were destroying Georgia forests. There are other clear-cut precedents.

The appellate court's opinion closes by paraphrasing a Supreme Court opinion from almost 40 years ago. New federal regulation may pre-empt the federal common law of nuisance, but, until then, federal courts are empowered to address the public nuisance caused by major, undisputed and destructive sources of greenhouse gases.

Rivkin and Casey also disbelieve, by the way, in the applicability of those interstate sewage and sulfur examples:

Federal common law nuisance actions have been generally limited to cases where activities in one state, such as creating air or water pollution, have a direct and identifiable harmful impact in another state. The federal courts have stepped into such cases because the states have no other mechanism to resolve disputes that may be too limited in scope to warrant congressional action.

The Times editors say that because "there is no federal regulation of this problem in force, it is fortunate that there is a line of Supreme Court precedents back to 1901 on which the plaintiffs can build their challenge." They continue:

When this lawsuit began seven years ago, one of the defendants' main defenses was that, because the Clean Air Act and other laws "address" carbon dioxide emissions, Congress has "legislated on the subject" and pre-empted the suit. The pre-emption claim was spurious when they made it and remains spurious now.

A Wall Street Journal news report about the case doesn't say when to expect a decision. Neither does a New York Times article posted online just after the Supreme Court heard the case, though its headline obviously means to telegraph a surmise: "States' Emissions 'Nuisance' Argument Seems to Fall on Deaf Ears in Supreme Court."

Alarmism in the news, cont.

This report has nothing whatsoever to do with science, but everything to do with alarmism in the news—a problem and challenge having lots to do with science. (Some examples: radiation, space weather, asteroids, cell phones' alleged health effects and—I'm not making this up—whether last month's "super moon," when the full moon appeared abnormally large, could cause natural disasters.)

Above the fold on the Washington Post's 20 April front page appeared what's probably a bit of a case study in news-reporting alarmism: the story of Mrs. Obama's airplane's landing incident.

As a non-aviator, my own amateur surmise when I first heard of the incident via broadcast media was that the danger was being way overblown. So even without the prompting of James Fallows's blog posting at the Atlantic—"Michelle Obama's Plane Was Not in 'Danger'"—I'd have been skeptical of the headline appearing on at least one paper edition of the Post: "Jet with first lady escapes close call: Presidential plane had to abort landing after error by controller, officials say." (The story's online version may be evolving.)

But Fallows, as it happens, is a reasonably experienced aviator, not to mention a veteran critic of some of his colleagues in the national media—for example, in his book Breaking the News. He calls out this line from the Post story: "A White House plane carrying Michelle Obama came dangerously close to a 200-ton military cargo jet and had to abort its landing at Andrews Air Force Base on Monday as the result of an air traffic controller's mistake, according to federal officials familiar with the incident." Fallows observes that two paragraphs later, the article reports that the Federal Aviation Administration has already said that there was never any danger.

He continues:

As FAA spokesmen said, and as the NYT made clear in a much calmer-toned story (the WSJ calm too), the maneuvers required of Mrs. Obama's plane—doing "S-turns" to slow down as it neared the airport, and then "going around" for another approach when it became clear that the first plane wouldn't get off the runway in time—are routine and the farthest things from emergency procedures. A mistake, yes. A near-miss, no.

Last month, the Post had a similar alarmist story about National Airport's sleeping controller forcing planes to "land on their own." (The online version of the story has been changed from the one I talked about in that post, to a calmer lead.) It was obviously bad then to have no one on duty in the tower, and it was bad this time that the planes got closer than they should have. But there was nothing in this new situation to justify the assertion that the planes got "dangerously close." I hope that by the time you see the online version this story will have been changed too.

Newspaper reporters and editors work fast on short deadlines. Among their duties, obviously, are two that conflict:

• To avoid deciding too much for the public, which can mean allowing stories to convey more alarm than might later seem to have been wise.
• To exercise judiciousness, which can mean preventing stories from conveying the degree of alarm that might later seem to have been wise.

No doubt it's easier to calibrate alarm when the story—as in many science-related cases—lacks real-time immediacy. But in my view the calibration of alarm is nevertheless an important issue for everyone who cares about science and the media.

Reactor cancellations said to affect nuclear power prospects generally

Leaving aside the question's mixed-metaphor problem, can the wheels really fall off of a renaissance?

All three of the big East Coast national newspapers reported this week that, thanks to Fukushima and changes in the economics of electricity production, NRG Energy is abandoning plans to add two new reactors to its two-reactor South Texas Project nuclear station, 90 miles southwest of Houston.

The Washington Post's wire-service article reported that support "for new nuclear projects in the US has eroded in the aftermath of the nuclear crisis in Japan, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll conducted earlier this month" and that of "dozens of proposals for new nuclear reactors ... submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission" only "a handful of projects remain active."

A Wall Street Journal business article called NRG's announcement "the most tangible evidence, to date, of fallout in the US from the nuclear accident in Japan." (Might be another ill-fitting metaphor in that one, actually.) Besides noting that NRG was planning on reactors designed by Toshiba, the WSJ article reported that the company was also "depending on financial assistance from Tokyo Electric Power Co., owner of the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex."

Matthew Wald's New York Times article concluded with this passage, which sums up all three papers' view of the implications of the NRG-Texas news:

The public's appetite for nuclear power projects resembles the situation right after the Three Mile Island accident of 1979, said Charles A. Zielinski, a lawyer in Washington who is a former chairman of the New York State Public Service Commission. Companies now factor in the prospect of higher construction costs, mixed with a slack demand.

The South Texas Project "may have been on the fence already, and Fukushima pushed it over," Mr. Zielinski said.

Tom Smith, an organizer in Austin with Public Citizen and a longtime campaigner against the project, cited higher construction costs and uncertainty after the Fukushima accident.

"The wheels are starting to fall off the nuclear renaissance," he said.

Science, Tahrir Square, Bruce Alberts

David Ignatius's 21 April Washington Post column asserted that America should "spend more to support the democratic revolution in Egypt and less to seek a military solution in Afghanistan." Ignatius advocates "helping the Tahrir Square revolutionaries build a strong new country that can lead the rest of the Arab and Islamic world toward a better, saner future."

Does science have a role?

The April Physics Today article "Freedom, fairness, and funds give hope to Egypt's scientists" reported optimism about science in Egypt's future. In February, the "Science and the Media" posting "Scientist president for Egypt?" reported on a Nature Middle East commentary about the the Nobel chemist Ahmed Zewail's prospects to become Egypt's president.

That discussion appeared in the "House of Wisdom" blog of Mohammed Yahia, NME's editor, who this week posted "Bruce Alberts on the future of science." That new posting begins:

Celebrated American biochemist Bruce Alberts, editor-in-chief of Science and author of the Molecular Biology of the Cell, which is pretty much the standard cell biology textbook in most universities, visited the American University in Cairo (AUC), Egypt, where he gave a talk to students, media and members of the public about the role of science in the future.

The over-packed room listened intently as Alberts spoke of how no democracy can function properly without what Indian prime minister Nehru once called "the scientific temper."

"Science and technology can make a major difference for national development," said Alberts. He stressed that scientists must have a more prominent role as the young people go out to rebuild Egypt after 30 years of authoritarian rule.

Alberts is following through with actions to back up his own past words.

"I consider science education to be critically important to both science and the world," he wrote in a 21 March 2008 editorial at the beginning of his tenure as editor-in-chief of Science, "and I shall frequently address this topic on this page." That editorial asked, "Might it be possible to encourage, across the world, scientific habits of mind, so as to create more rational societies everywhere?" Alberts urged that rather "than only conveying what science has discovered about the natural world, as is done now in most countries, a top priority should be to empower all students with the knowledge and practice of how to think like a scientist." He added, "Scientists share a common way of reaching conclusions that is based not only on evidence and logic, but also requires honesty, creativity, and openness to new ideas."

A few weeks later in another editorial, he continued his ambitious expansiveness concerning the potential of science and scientists to change the world. "[E]veryone can benefit when scientists take on practical problems," he wrote, asserting that in fact the "future success of humanity may depend on learning to use the tools of science—including the collection of objective evidence on what works and why—at all levels of decision-making." He advised that "scientists will need to develop much deeper connections with the rest of society." He reported that he had "repeatedly witnessed the innovation that arises from recruiting scientists and outstanding practitioners to work together, using scientific approaches to tackle important problems."

In late 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appointed what an article in Science called "three prominent scientists as special envoys to assess the potential for scientific partnerships with Muslim-majority countries," which the article said was "the first concrete step in a broader US effort to expand the role of science in diplomacy." The three new envoys were

• Egyptian-born Ahmed H. Zewail, the Caltech Nobel laureate chemist,
• Algerian-born Elias Zerhouni, the radiologist and former NIH director, and
• Alberts, the former National Academy of Sciences president.

The appointments were said to build upon President Obama's earlier speech at Cairo University that had called for a new beginning in relations with the Muslim world.

So it's plain that Bruce Alberts, anyway, believes there's a role for science in the post-Tahrir democratic transformation that Ignatius hopes to see take place in Egypt with constructive American involvement.

Here's the rest of that Nature Middle East "House of Wisdom" blog posting about Alberts's visit:

[Alberts said] "Scientists can't stay in their universities anymore. They must go out all across Egypt. Often, only local scientists will have the credibility required to rescue a nation from misguided local policies and beliefs."

Alberts is an example of a scientist who has gone out to change the world. He has been very active in using science and technology to bring development on southeastern Asia. He is also one of the most prominent science diplomats, becoming one of the first three science envoys from Obama in his reach-out efforts to the Muslim world.

Alberts talked of the importance of an overhaul to science education as Egyptians rebuild their state. "Science education is not just about learning words of science—but about participating as scientists do, even from as early as when they are five years old."

He also stressed the need to "support the statuses of teachers" since they are primarily responsible to produce a new successful generation. "No democracy can work when people don't understand. They must be educated to analyze the choices being made for them by politicians." Modern technology can be used to educate people with the increasing popularity of social networks.

During the talk, Alberts drew several parallels between the future and opportunities of Egypt and those of India, who is quickly emerging as one of the important science centres of the world.

"As in India, science and technology can be harnessed to improve the livelihoods of people, even among the rural poor."

While talking to the young audience after the talk, Alberts stressed the important role of young people and said he went down to Tahrir Square, the epicentre of Egypt's 25 January Revolution, and met with some of the young people who participated in the events that led to the overthrow of Egypt's authoritarian government. "I'm a big believer in empowering young people to address their problems. The culture of science, such as honesty, tolerance and respect for logic will be critical for Egypt's future."

Anyone who knows me would expect to see this report tied together with some reference or other to a scientist who long ago occupied the White House, Thomas Jefferson. Here it is:

Some people, no doubt with good reason, express deep skepticism about American intrusiveness overseas, and maybe they're right when they assert that Jefferson would have counseled isolationism. But it is also true that Jefferson found the fundamental principles underlying good government nearly congruent with those underlying science. Maybe Alberts can't help. I don't know. But those principles can.

A fire in the access shaft of the Soudan Mine in Minnesota appears to have caused little damage to the experiments that exploit the shielding from cosmic rays provided by the roughly 714-m-deep Soudan Underground Laboratory. The cause of the 17 March fire is still being investigated, but was probably started by sparks generated during maintenance work.

Power was out for 10 days, but sump pumps got back to work in time to prevent flooding. Three weeks after the fire, the main concern was whether the cryogenic detectors had been harmed by the uncontrolled warming due to the power outage. The warming "made us very nervous but there does not appear to be damage" to the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) experiment, says the University of Minnesota's Priscilla Cushman.

A firefighter pumps water and foam down the shaft.
(Photo Credit: William Miller)

Although the fire cut short by a month tests on detectors for the follow-on experiment, SuperCDMS, for which Cushman is co-spokesperson, she says those engineering tests will be "declared done" and the physics run will start this summer as planned.

Several smaller experiments in the underground lab, such as dark-matter search CoGeNT (Coherent Germanium Neutrino Technology), still have to be checked to see if their detectors have been compromised by having tiny amounts of material deposited on them due to the warming.

The Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search, a detector for neutrinos beamed from Fermilab 735 km away, has to be dried and its electromagnetic coil and other parts assessed. The MINOS lab needs a good cleanup from the firefighting foam and debris that got pulled in with it.

Other than that, though, the outlook is good, says lab director Marvin Marshak. Cleaning the mine shaft and the lab, including replacing a damaged power feed and repairing water and communications systems, is expected to take two to three months.

Toni Feder

Steve Corneliussen's topics this week:

• A rationale for revamping federal research as outlined in a Nature commentary
  
• Media coverage of a congressional hearing on climate
  
• Hands-on engineering competitions for science outreach to students
  
• A pair of articles about global vulnerability to solar effects
  
• A pair of celebrations of women in science around the world
  

Daniel Sarewitz in Nature: Transform civilian research on DOD model

Has "the nation's civilian research and development enterprise . . . been built on a foundation of hidden assumptions and unsubstantiated claims"? According to Daniel Sarewitz's latest column in Nature, that's the implication of the famous 2005 observation by John Marburger, President Bush's science advisor. Marburger declared that "the framework . . . that we use to evaluate policies and assess strength in science and technology" is "primitive."

Sarewitz is based in Washington, DC, but is co-director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University. He argues that although we haven't realized it, in the nation's technoscience efforts of past decades, the Department of Defense has had the winning formula—unlike the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy and NASA.

He characterizes the DOD formula this way: "close and persistent ties [with] private industry," plus investments "in emerging fields such as computer science, sub-atomic and solid-state physics, and materials science," leading to "waves of innovation" that have "created whole industries that helped to fuel the US economy." He sees both ARPA-E, with its focus "on high-risk R&D and collaborations between universities and private firms," and recent NASA,with its new outreach to private-sector spaceflight, as confirmations of his view.

Sarewitz closes by asserting what he calls "an inescapable reality":

The civilian research agencies were designed as temples of scientific excellence and technological prowess, but they lack the institutional architecture of the cold-war military-industrial complex, and are ill-structured to create and sustain essential links between knowledge generation, technological innovation and desired social outcomes. It is not a matter of basic versus applied research, but of insular versus integrated approaches. If this is truly our generation's Sputnik moment, it will take more than money. The United States must transform its science enterprise to enhance links between research and its application to national needs.

The question of balance in climate reporting, cont.

How should the New York Times, or any newspaper, report climate-science claims like those made by Representative Morgan Griffith of Virginia, a freshman Republican, at a March 8 congressional hearing? If opponents have tried time and again to rebut the claims, and if the claims nevertheless keep recurring without apparent engagement of the rebuttals, should an impartial reporter say so? (And if the reporter does say so, can the congressman's side then justly assert some symmetrical, corresponding call?)

The hearing carried the formal name "Climate Science and EPA's Greenhouse Gas Regulations." In the Times article "At House E.P.A. Hearing, Both Sides Claim Science," John Broder reports that Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee's subcommittee on energy and power "demanded the hearing in the hope of slowing the inexorable progress [of] the Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011, which enjoys the near-unanimous support of the Republican House majority." Broder explains:

The measure would overturn the E.P.A.'s finding that carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases pose a threat to public health and the environment and would bar the agency from writing any regulations to control them. The bill's sponsors say that the climate science behind the finding is dubious and that the proposed rules would have a devastating impact on the economy.

Here's how Broder reported Rep. Griffith's comments:

[Rep. Griffith], and an avowed skeptic on climate change, noted that ancient temperature records indicate periods of warming during the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations and again during the rise of the Vikings, and wanted the scientists to explain just how warm it got during those eras.

Mr. Griffith also wanted to know why the ice caps on Mars were melting and why he had been taught 40 years ago in middle school that Earth was entering a cooling period.

"What is the optimum temperature for man?" he asked. "Have we looked at that? These are questions that, believe it or not, I lay awake at night trying to figure out."

The scientists promised to provide written answers.

"That's a list of nonsense that has already been dealt with and debunked a bazillion times," responded one blog posting. It went on to criticize Broder for failing to say so, and offered a link to a web site that catalogs answers to commonly heard objections like the congressman's. At the liberal blog Science Progress, a posting called "A science-free Congress" calls the hearing part of an effort "to overturn a science-based determination absent any scientific justification for doing so."

At RealClimate, Gavin Schmidt found the prospect of the hearing important enough to undertake "Live-blogging the climate science hearings," the headline on the RealClimate posting that he offered in advance. There he began by predicting that as "usual, this hearing will likely be long on political grandstanding and short on informed discussion."

Neither the Washington Post nor the Wall Street Journal covered the hearing at all.

Engagement model: Student robotics as sport

If you like the bidirectional "engagement model" of technoscience outreach—as opposed to the "deficit model" merely involving unidirectional information conveyance—you might want to read a recent Wall Street Journal piece by Robert P. Crease, the Stony Brook professor who writes the "Critical Point" science-and-society column for Physics World.

It's a book review. Crease presents Neal Bascomb's The New Cool as the story of a burgeoning hands-on high school robotics program called FIRST, which seeks to change large numbers of American teenagers' tendency to worship sports and entertainment idols while not even knowing the name of a single living scientist.

But FIRST—For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology—doesn't try to teach the names of Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Greene, or, for that matter, Henry Petroski (who has been called a Carl Sagan of engineering). Instead, it means to enthrall teenagers in hands-on robotics engineering competitions.

Still, the inventor Dean Kamen (insulin pump, Segway) is centrally involved. Crease explains that Kamen launched FIRST two decades ago "to bring some sports-like hoopla to science and engineering" and notes that while "the initial event, in 1992, drew 28 entries . . . this year's competition has nearly 2,000 teams in three leagues for elementary, middle and high schools." Crease says Bascomb's book is "about the ways in which Mr. Kamen has used robotics to create a cachet of geekiness among students"—and that Bascomb presents it not as a science-outreach story, but as a sports story.

"It is inspiring," Crease writes, "to see these kids work so hard and achieve a certain level of engineering expertise and high-school celebrity." Crease reports Bascomb's focus on a robotics team from "a suburban public high school of about 2300 students that struggles with apathy, drugs and dropouts." The students engage a competition requiring them to design and build robots to collect balls from a slippery surface. Crease declares that the book "offers a lesson in how American kids can thrive when faced with daunting challenges."

But Crease concludes with an anecdote illuminating the daunting overall science-outreach challenge. At a FIRST event, he writes, Kamen "brought out rapper Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas," gave him a FIRST cap, and "suggested that if Will wanted to look truly cool he should wear it a few weeks later during the group's half-time show at the Super Bowl."

"I watched the game and the half-time performance," Crease continues. "Didn't notice the cap, did you? There's still work to do."

Holdren, Beddington: "Celestial Storm Warnings"

Two news commentaries late this week asked readers to add space weather to their worry lists.

With a relatively lower media profile, the Washington Post's "Capital Weather Gang" blog offered the first part of a series of posts aimed at informing readers about the space-weather threat. With a relatively higher media profile, the science advisers to President Barack Obama and UK Prime Minister David Cameron published the op-ed "Celestial Storm Warnings" in the International Herald Tribune.

John P. Holdren and John Beddington cautioned that "the world's reliance on electronic technology—and therefore vulnerability to space weather—has increased substantially since the last peak" of solar activity roughly a decade ago, and that with another peak expected in 2011-2012, it's important now "to identify, test, and begin to deploy the best array of protective measures practicable, in parallel with reaching out to the public with information explaining the risks and the remedies."

And indeed the authors do some of that explaining. "From sporadic solar flares to ethereal shimmering aurora," they write, "manifestations of severe space weather have the power to adversely affect the integrity of the world's power grids, the accuracy and availability of GPS, the reliability of satellite-delivered telecommunications and the utility of radio and over-the-horizon radar." They cite the possibility of consequences "on the order of $2 trillion during the first year in the United States alone," with recovery taking from 4 to 10 years.

"History is rife with warnings," they declare, and then they do some itemizing. They list an 1859 disruption of compasses and telegraphy, a 1921 space-weather incident that "wiped out communications and generated fires" in the American northeast, a 1989 geomagnetic storm that "caused Canada's Hydro-Quebec power grid to collapse within 90 seconds, leaving millions of people in darkness for up to nine hours," and two intense storms in 2003 that "traveled from the Sun to Earth in just 19 hours, causing a blackout in Sweden and affecting satellites, broadcast communications, airlines and navigation." One study, they say, foresees how a "loss of power could lead to a cascade of operational failures that could leave society and the global economy severely disabled."

Holdren and Beddington stipulate that with recent science, "we now have a better understanding of the causes and frequency of these events." But they warn that "scientists also indicate that the severity of future storms could be much greater than those experienced in recent decades, pointing to the critical need for careful monitoring of the Sun and its effects on the Earth."

They mention "wide-ranging" international "cooperation and data sharing in the space-weather domain." They report that much "can be done to reduce risks," with possibilities that include "back-ups for crucial systems such as GPS, tougher protective shielding for satellites . . . blocking devices to harden power grids, and replacements for aging scientific satellites . . . to provide advanced warnings." They close with an assurance that "commitment on both sides of the Atlantic" exists for taking the needed steps.

Another recent space-weather article might also merit mention—for the way that it's hyped. In the UK, MailOnline this week offered "Get ready for a 'global Katrina': Biggest ever solar storm could cause power cuts which last for MONTHS." The piece begins by asserting that the "world is overdue a ferocious 'space storm'" and that "mankind is now more vulnerable to a major solar storm than at any time in history."

International views of women in science

A pair of international views of women in science appeared this week: the annual L'Oréal–UNESCO Awards for Women in Science and the posting "Women in science in the Arab world" at Nature Middle East's "House of Wisdom" blog.

L'Oréal–UNESCO celebrated its 2011 honorees in a full-page ad on the back of the 8 March Science Times section of the New York Times. "Unesco and L'Oréal are convinced," the ad says, "that science is the source of progress for society and that women have an essential role to play in that progress." The honorees are Anne l'Huillier, an atomic physicist in Sweden; Vivian Wing-Wah Yam, a chemist in China; Faiza Al-Kharafi, a chemist in Kuwait; Silvia Torres-Peimbert, an astrophysicist in Mexico; and Jillian Banfield, an American geophysicist.

Faiza Al-Kharafi's name also appears in the "House of Wisdom" posting. It identifies her as president of Kuwait University and vice-president of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World. "Today is the 100th anniversary of the International Women's Day," the posting begins, "and there is no better time to celebrate the amazing influence that some women scientists are having in the Arab world."

The posting offers three more examples: Nadia El-Awady is the founding president of the Arab Science Journalists Association and the first Arab president of the World Federation of Science Journalists. The posting notes that during "the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, she was on the front lines as a revolutionary protester." Nagwa Abdel Meguid, an Egyptian geneticist, was the first Arab L'Oréal honoree. She's reportedly known "for her research in same-blood marriages (very popular in the Arab region) and their effect on the higher rate of birth defects and genetic disorders."

Finally, Hayat Sindi, "the first woman from the Gulf States to receive a PhD in biotechnology from Cambridge University," is "a nanotechnology researcher working to deliver affordable point-of-care diagnostic solutions to the developing world through the not-for-profit Diagnostics For All," and "has invented a machine combining the effects of light and ultrasound for use in biotechnology."

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.

Steve Corneliussen's topics this week:

• Research funding for 2011 as seen in some Sunday Washington Post opinions
  
• Emphatic alarm in a Post commentary about anthropogenic global warming
  
• The latest installment in the New York Times's Radiation Boom series
  
• The proposal to give the present geological epoch an anthropomorphic name
  
• A New York Times front-page report about disrespect for the teaching profession
  
• Raymond Orbach's trenchant Science magazine defense of 2011 research funding
  

Research funding defended in Washington Post

"On the Sunday Opinions page today," begins a 27 February Washington Post editorial, "we publish alarms from a number of advocates for federal programs endangered by Republican budget cutting. We sympathize with many of the appeals. But we also recognize that the United States is facing a fiscal challenge that, if unaddressed, threatens US prosperity and global leadership."

The editors ask, "So how should priorities be set?" Among their answers:

Third, government should promote economic growth. That means maintaining ports, roads, rails, subways and airports; educating the next generation; and supporting science. But grandiose projects such as trips to Mars or high-speed rail to Las Vegas will have to wait.

The Sunday Opinions page offers seven opinions, each in a blurb a bit less than half the length of a standard op-ed. Two will particularly interest scientists.

General James L. Jones, now a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, and formerly national security adviser to President Obama, focuses on "America's severe economic and national security vulnerability to dependence on foreign oil." Citing "the Defense Department's successful record developing transformative technologies through its DARPA program," and advocating "ARPA-E to advance high-risk, high-reward technologies that enhance our national security," Jones writes:

While new energy production technologies must ultimately be driven by the private sector and competitive markets, only the federal government has the rational incentive to make the early, up-front investments in the real technology breakthroughs—such as durable electricity storage, advanced modular nuclear reactors and the development of new transportation fuels.

ARPA-E enjoys several unusual but critical institutional attributes—independent hiring authority to bring in the best minds from academia and the private sector, autonomous decision-making ability, and the capacity to take risks. These attributes are vital to achieving success in our globalized, 21st-century economy and should become increasingly more commonplace throughout the rest of our government.

Another of the opinion blurbs comes from Thomas Mason and Persis Drell, directors of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, respectively. They write:

Fully half of U.S. economic growth since 1945 can be attributed to investments in science and technology. Our colleagues Paul Alivisatos, Eric Isaacs, Sam Aronson and Michael Kluse—the other directors of the Department of Energy's Multi-program National Laboratories—agree that the competitive advantage the United States retains in technological innovation would be seriously jeopardized by extensive cuts to research proposed in House Resolution 1 for fiscal 2011. These reductions ignore the fact that innovation—not trade policies or labor costs—is the most important factor in global economic competitiveness and continued American prosperity.

The dramatic proposed cuts came just weeks after Congress extended the America Competes Act (Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education and Science). This bipartisan legislation was a statement that even in difficult times a priority should be placed on federally funded research tied to innovations that spawn new products and companies.

The United States still has the ability to compete successfully, but only if we invest in the scientific talent and infrastructure critical to fueling the private sector's need for new technologies. Whether it's a smartphone, a new drug or a battery that powers an electric car from Washington to Indianapolis, publicly supported research is almost always an essential contribution in the discovery chain.

Science will not be exempted from the sacrifices that have to be made across the entire federal budget. The challenge is to prioritize these reductions in a more thoughtful way that does not result in lasting damage to America's capacity for innovation.

Just as we cannot fix an overweight plane by removing an engine, we should not attempt to fix a deficit problem by removing America's ability to compete.

Five-alarm climate change

If the question of degree of alarm in climate discussion matters, then an article prominently placed on the front of the 27 February Washington Post Sunday Outlook section merits attention. Here's the teaser atop the print version: "The world is running out of time to stop climate change, says activist Mike Tidwell. So he's preparing for a future of food riots, freakish weather—and fending for himself."

Tidwell is executive director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, which calls itself "the first grassroots, non-profit organization dedicated exclusively to fighting global warming in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C." He begins by reporting that he has partly supplemented and partly replaced his personal environmentalism with deadbolt locks on his doors, a generator in his garage, and a "starter kit to raise tomatoes and lettuce behind barred basement windows." He's "not a survivalist or an 'end times' enthusiast," he stipulates, but "just a realist" when it comes to climate change, because "we're running out of time."

He vividly cites recent examples of extreme weather—and attributes every one of them to climate change. He borrows Winston Churchill's words from just before World War II: "The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences."

Tidwell explains that those "consequences explain the generator in my garage and why I'm reinforcing my basement windows to protect emergency supplies," and adds: "This may seem like a stunt, or a sign that this frustrated environmentalist has finally lost it. But I'm not crazy. Just wait. The mega-storms and social disruptions on the horizon will be the best proof of that."

Here's a typical passage:

On the security side, it was the global food riots of 2008 and 2010 that led me to replace the 50-year-old locks on all my doors last fall. I'm not normally the paranoid type, but when extreme weather alternately baked and flooded wheat fields in Australia and Russia, helping to jack up grain prices more than 40 percent worldwide and leading hungry people to protest from Mexico to Mozambique to Serbia, I took notice. After all, the many climate effects we're already seeing—massive wildfires, bigger hurricanes, astonishing Arctic ice melt—all result from just 1.2 degrees of planetary warming since 1900. Now scientists at the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say the planet could warm another five degrees by the end of this century.

If that happens, Iowa is done for. Corn and wheat will wither and die on a scale never before seen. That's because heat-triggered mega-droughts will intensify across much of America's "continental interior" regions, scientists say, as flooding increases elsewhere. Iowa and much of the Heartland will resemble a scrub desert.

How will we feed ourselves adequately if our breadbasket is a desert? Answer: We won't, and there will be social unrest as a result.

Tidwell also reports that he "even took [his] first-ever lesson in firearms use last December" and that he's "not planning to join the Earth Liberation Front or some such militia." However, he asks, "wouldn't even a level-headed person want to be ready to defend his family if climate chaos goes to the max?"

If you consider his actions alarmist, he says, he "can't really blame you," for he'd "be confused about climate change, too, if [he] got most of [his] information from the half-asleep news media, much less the committed disinformers at Fox News and the Heritage Foundation." He offers a question for skeptics: "Why would private insurance companies lie about climate change? Already, Allstate has stopped selling new homeowners' policies in coastal Virginia and Maryland because the warming Atlantic Ocean is bringing larger hurricanes to the region."

Tidwell predicts:

Our trees are going to keep falling in ways we've never seen before. Our streets are going to flood. Our neighborhood bridges will wash out. Our roofs will sag from freak snowstorms and bake from unimaginable heat. And our power will keep going out, no matter how many "service improvements" Pepco makes. We've waited too long to avoid all this.

He ends by noting that ten years ago, he put solar panels on his roof "as an act of love for the planet." Now he's "making new changes, focused on [his] immediate loved ones. The era of consequences, at every conceivable level, has entered our world. Ready or not."

Medical physics returns to New York Times front page

The 28 February New York Times front page offers another very long article in the Times's Radiation Boom series examining "issues arising from the increasing use of medical radiation and the new technologies that deliver it." The online headline this time: "X-Rays and Unshielded Infants."

"Radiation Boom" articles begin with horror stories. This time it's about "the discovery that the tiniest, most vulnerable of all patients—premature babies—had been over-radiated" at State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn.

The articles also advocate increased regulation. Today's lengthy piece moves from the opening horror story to what it calls "broader questions about the competence, training and oversight of technologists who operate radiological equipment that is becoming increasingly complex and powerful." The Times asks, "If technologists could not properly take a simple chest X-ray, how can they be expected to safely operate CT scanners or linear accelerators?"

The article continues:

With technologists in many states lightly regulated, or not at all, their own professional group is calling for greater oversight and standards. For 12 years, the American Society of Radiologic Technologists has lobbied Congress to pass a bill that would establish minimum educational and certification requirements, not only for technologists, but also for medical physicists and people in 10 other occupations in medical imaging and radiation therapy.

Yet even with broad bipartisan support, the association said, and the backing of 26 organizations representing more than 500,000 health professionals, Congress has yet to pass what has become known as the CARE bill because, supporters say, it lacks a powerful legislator to champion its cause.

In December 2006, the Senate passed the bill, but Congress adjourned before the House could vote. At the time, the House bill had 135 co-sponsors.

"I would think the public would be outraged that Congress was sitting on what could reduce their radiation exposure," said Dr. Fred Mettler, a radiologist who has investigated and written extensively about radiation accidents.

Individual states decide what standards, if any, radiological workers must meet. Radiation therapists are unregulated in 15 states, imaging technologists in 11 states and medical physicists in 18 states, according to the technologists association. "There are individuals," said Dr. Jerry Reid, executive director of a group that certifies technologists, "who are performing medical imaging and radiation therapy who are not qualified. It is happening right now."

Under the subheading "Children Are Most at Risk," the article explains that because "their cells divide quickly, children are more vulnerable to radiation's effects" and that "as new ways are found to use radiation in diagnosing and treating injuries and disease, children face an ever-increasing number of radiological procedures." The Times cites a recent finding "that by the age of 18, the average child will have already received more than seven radiological exams." Moreover, it says, in "premature infants, minimizing radiation exposure is especially important because they may require multiple radiological exams for problems like underdeveloped respiratory systems."

The article eventually notes that "[f]ull-body X-rays of babies are rarely done" and that "Dr. Donald Frush, chief of pediatric radiology at the Duke University School of Medicine, said that failing to properly cone, or collimate, the radiation was rare."

Under the subheading "Push for Continuing Education," the article reports that supporters of the proposed CARE legislation emphasize its continuing-education requirement. The Times adds that a "continuing-education provision might have prevented the over-radiation of 76 patients at a hospital in Missouri—a state that does not regulate its radiological workers. The medical physicist there had selected the wrong calibration tool to set up a highly sophisticated linear accelerator."

The article ends by quoting Dr. Steve Goetsch, a medical physicist in California who runs training programs: "In my profession, there is very little room for error and no room for unqualified personnel."

The Anthropocene

A 28 February New York Times editorial intrigues readers concerning a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: "The Anthropocene: a new epoch of geological time?"

The special issue offers 13 articles. Here's the abstract of the introductory piece:

Anthropogenic changes to the Earth's climate, land, oceans and biosphere are now so great and so rapid that the concept of a new geological epoch defined by the action of humans, the Anthropocene, is widely and seriously debated. Questions of the scale, magnitude and significance of this environmental change, particularly in the context of the Earth's geological history, provide the basis for this Theme Issue. The Anthropocene, on current evidence, seems to show global change consistent with the suggestion that an epoch-scale boundary has been crossed within the last two centuries.

The Times editorial begins by setting context, first mentioning human-history eras like the Renaissance, then contrasting them with geological time scales. "Humans existed when the Pleistocene ended and the Holocene began, 11 500 years ago," the editors observe. "Among scientists, there is now serious talk that the Holocene has ended and a new era has begun." They note that it was Paul Crutzen, who shared a Nobel Prize for work on the chemical mechanisms that affect the ozone layer, who first used the term Anthropocene, in 2000.

The editors argue that there's "a strong case that the Anthropocene begins with the Industrial Revolution, around 1800, when we began to exert our most profound impact on the world, especially by altering the carbon content of the atmosphere." Their ending may merit quoting:

Other species are embedded in the fossil record of the epochs they belong to. Some species, like ammonites and brachiopods, even serve as guides—or index fossils—to the age of the rocks they're embedded in. But we are the only species to have defined a geological period by our activity—something usually performed by major glaciations, mass extinction and the colossal impact of objects from outer space, like the one that defines the upper boundary of the Cretaceous.

Humans were inevitably going to be part of the fossil record. But the true meaning of the Anthropocene is that we have affected nearly every aspect of our environment—from a warming atmosphere to the bottom of an acidifying ocean.

New York Times front page: scorning teachers

Whatever may or may not need saying about teachers' unions, surely teachers' perceptions of their profession merit attention, possibly including the anecdotal kind that the question received in the 3 March New York Times.

"One of the astounding things about the rhetoric sweeping through statehouses across the United States," says a letter to the editor, "is the notion that teachers, of all people, are overpaid and selfish. Teachers continue to be just as underpaid and committed as they were before this insidious discourse was introduced." The letter echoes some of what's in the front-page article "Teachers Wonder, Why the Heapings of Scorn?"

The article begins by focusing on Erin Parker, a second-year high school science teacher in Madison, Wisconsin. She feels "punched in the stomach" when she encounters this comment: "Oh you pathetic teachers. . . . You are glorified baby sitters who leave work at 3 p.m. You deserve minimum wage."

She earns $36 000. She owes $26 000 on student loans. She owns no car and can't begin to think of buying a house. She's going to head for Colorado, where she'll live with her parents so she can afford to keep teaching.

Then the article states its main point:

Around the country, many teachers see demands to cut their income, benefits and say in how schools are run through collective bargaining as attacks not just on their livelihoods, but on their value to society.

Even in a country that is of two minds about teachers—Americans glowingly recall the ones who changed their lives, but think the job with its summers off is cushy—education experts say teachers have rarely been the targets of such scorn from politicians and voters.

The article reports extensively on the politics of education reform, but also reports the views of a math teacher and a science teacher. It quotes Lindsay Vlachakis, 25, a high school math teacher in Madison: "I put my heart and soul into teaching. When people attack teachers, they're attacking me."

And finally it quotes Anthony Cody, who "taught middle-school science for 18 years and now mentors new teachers in the Oakland, California, school district":

"What we need in these schools is stability," said Mr. Cody, 52, who writes a blog about teaching. "We need to convince people that if they invest their career in working with these challenging students, then we will reward them and appreciate them. We will not subject them to arbitrary humiliation in the newspaper. We will not require they be evaluated and paid based on test scores that often fluctuate greatly beyond the teacher's control."

Orbach in Science: Bill would "end America's legendary status" as world science leader

Raymond L. Orbach, who served as undersecretary for science at the Department of Energy for President George W. Bush, asserts in a 4 March Science magazine commentary that a funding bill for the present fiscal year passed on 19 February in the House of Representatives "would effectively end America's legendary status as the leader of the worldwide scientific community, putting the United States at a distinct disadvantage when competing with other nations in the global marketplace."

The signed opinion piece, called an editorial in Science's lexicon, first appeared online on 24 February. In it, Orbach asks legislators instead to sustain "the bipartisan commitment to double the science research budgets of the National Science Foundation, the DOE Office of Science, and the National Institute for Science and Technology over 10 years"—as "supported by both Presidents Bush and Obama" and as "affirmed as recently as last December in the America COMPETES Act."

The bill's spending cuts, Orbach writes, "would have a devastating effect on an array of critical scientific research." He cites the Office of Science generally, as well as cuts at its Office of Biology and Environmental Research "that would all but eliminate . . . the hope for developing transportation fuels derived from plant cellulose." He also condemns cuts for Energy Frontier Research Centers that "support activities based at 28 universities and 16 national laboratories." He emphasizes, and elaborates on, the threats to the national laboratories generally.

Orbach closes by granting that the "budget deficit is serious" but stipulates that "escaping from its clutches requires economic growth as well as budget reductions." He offers the reminder that well "over half of US economic growth in the past century can be traced to investments in science and technology."

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the Media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.

Steve Corneliussen's topics this week:

• Poor countries' loss of open access to scientific publications, as discussed at SciDev.Net and in The Lancet.
  
• Major newspapers' coverage of NASA's recent announcements concerning exoplanets.
  
• Some joshing of physicists in a New York Times letter to the editor.
  
• The Kepler satellite observatory's search for exoplanets, as discussed on the New York Times front page.
  
• Support for science education in a recent column by the conservative George F. Will.
  
• Many high-school biology teachers' lack of classroom forthrightness concerning evolution, as reported in Science magazine.
  

Commentary in The Lancet: Open access in the developing world, cont.

Though the general context is biomedicine, not physics, a commentary in The Lancet (free registration required) under the headline "Big publishers cut access to journals in poor countries" may merit attention from members of the physics community who follow the issue of open access in scientific publishing.

The 22 January commentary has already drawn attention at SciDev.Net, which calls itself "a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to providing reliable and authoritative information about science and technology for the developing world." There, a brief recent summary reports that in 2001, "publishing companies that include Elsevier, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, and Springer, signed up to the Health InterNetwork for Access to Research Initiative (HINARI)," which became "the main system providing free access to scientific journals in low-income countries."

The SciDev.Net summary continues:

In a deal negotiated by the WHO, they agreed to remain part of the system until at least 2015.

HINARI was not intended to solve the problem of access to scientific knowledge. . . . Yet it transformed the work of institutions in the developing world, enabling researchers to contribute to the knowledge needed to improve public health and reduce poverty.

But earlier this year, researchers in Bangladesh were told they no longer have free access to 2,500 journals through the system. Institutions in Kenya and Nigeria received similar messages, while scientists in other countries report being unable to access some journals as far back as 2007. According to the WHO [World Health Organization], 28 low-income countries are now excluded from HINARI.

Giving free access to low-income countries costs publishers virtually nothing . . . but cutting access can damage their image and trigger a backlash. Crucially, [the Lancet commentary's authors] say, it highlights that publishers are disconnected from the goals of governments and institutions working for development.

And indeed the full commentary piece in The Lancet begins, "The world's main system for allowing free access to scientific journals in low-income countries seems to be falling apart as big publishers withdraw." The authors, Tracey Pérez Koehlmoos and Richard Smith, call this development "a major step backwards for science, health, and development in low-income countries" and declare that "universal open access—to all journals in all countries—is the only long-term sustainable solution for access to scientific information in low-income and middle-income countries."

The commentary reports that around "4800 institutions in 105 countries have had access to some 7000 journals, including all the most prestigious publications," meaning "that institutions in poor countries had better access to journals than some leading universities in the rich world."

The commentary authors hammer hard in this passage:

Our immediate response is that this is an ungracious and ill-advised move on behalf of the publishers, reminiscent of when Elsevier was exposed as running arms fairs and then had to quit the business. In exchange for a few dollars, these publishers risk creating a torrent of ill-will against them from the excluded countries, authors around the world, and quite possibly their own staff. Pharmaceutical companies have learned the hard way that buccaneering tactics in poor countries do not work and will not be tolerated, and the consequence is severe damage to their image, brands, and products. Unlike the drug industry, which does incur distribution costs, the big commercial publishers can give free access to low-income countries at virtually no cost to themselves, something that seems to have passed them by on the basis of this latest decision.

Near the end, the commentary invokes a wider view of open access:

The companies have also taken this step at a time when the not-for-profit open-access movement is gathering pace. The Public Library of Science will soon be publishing 2% of all science, technology, and medicine papers through PloS One, obliging the Nature Publishing Group and other publishers to start something similar. True open access is the long-term answer to access to scientific studies in low-income and middle-income countries in a way that HINARI can never be.

The authors note that some "critics have rejoiced at this blow to HINARI because they think, perhaps rightly, that it will hasten the arrival of universal open access." In closing, they declare that they "share that aspiration, but temper our belief with the knowledge that universal open access is still something for the future."

Exoplanets: New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal

Do American newspapers value important astronomy news? Here's some anecdotal evidence: All three major East Coast national papers gave serious coverage to NASA's Wednesday exoplanet announcements, with front-page stories in the New York Times and Washington Post, and with a page 3 Robert Lee Hotz writeup in the Wall Street Journal.

Dennis Overbye in the Times, continuing from his previously discussed front-page article about the exoplanet-discovering Kepler satellite observatory, begins by summarizing the news:

Astronomers have cracked the Milky Way like a piñata, and planets are now pouring out so fast that they do not know what to do with them all. /blq

In a long-awaited announcement, scientists operating NASA's Kepler planet-hunting satellite reported on Wednesday that they had identified 1,235 possible planets orbiting other stars, potentially tripling the number of known planets.

Of the new candidates, 68 are one and a quarter times the size of the Earth or smaller—smaller, that is, than any previously discovered planets outside the solar system, which are known as exoplanets. Fifty-four of the possible exoplanets are in the so-called habitable zones of stars dimmer and cooler than the Sun, where temperatures should be moderate enough for liquid water.

Both the Times and the Post quote the astronomer Debra Fischer from Yale, who was not a member of the Kepler team. She declared that Kepler has "blown the lid off everything we thought we knew about exoplanets."

Here are some other quotations from the articles, beginning with this one from the WSJ:

"We are clearly finding out for sure now that smaller planets are more common than bigger planets," said astrophysicist Jonathan Fortney at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

From the Times:

"It boggles the mind," said the Kepler team's leader, William Borucki, of the Ames Research Center in Northern California.

Also:

"For the first time in human history, we have a pool of potentially rocky habitable-zone planets," said Sara Seager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who works with Kepler. "This is the first big step forward to answering the ancient question, 'How common are other Earths?'"

At a news conference at NASA headquarters in Washington on Wednesday, Mr. Borucki noted that the Keple telescope surveys only one four-hundredth of the sky. If it could see the whole sky, he said, "we would see 400,000 candidates."

Yet another from the Times:

Summarizing the news from the cosmos, Geoffrey W. Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, a veteran exoplanet hunter and a mainstay of the Kepler work, said, "There are so many messages here that it's hard to know where to begin."

He called the Borucki team's announcement "an extraordinary planet windfall, a moment that will be written in textbooks. It will be thought of as watershed."

From the Post:

"If Earth-sized planets are common, then it's likely that life is common on the planets around their stars," Borucki said. "This is really our first step in man's exploration of surrounding galaxies in terms of life and the extent of life that might be there."

Maybe it's often necessary to fault the media for inadequate science coverage, but maybe these three papers have done pretty well by astronomy this time.

Astronomer, writer kid physicists in New York Times letter

In reply to a New York Times editorial about the demise of the Tevatron at Fermilab in Illinois, the astronomer Jay M. Pasachoff and the writer Naomi Pasachoff have published a letter to the editor observing that the closure is not only sad, but might also be unwise. They wrote:

When, in 1993, Congress shut off funds for the superconducting supercollider being built underground in Texas, many of the newly unemployed physicists found jobs on Wall Street. Wouldn't you rather have the nation's physicists smashing protons than designing and smashing collateralized debt obligations?

New York Times front page: Kepler observatory, "Goldilocks" planets

News about NASA's Kepler satellite observatory appeared in Dennis Overbye's front-page New York Times article "Gazing Afar for Other Earths, and Other Beings" on 31 January—in advance of astronomers' scheduled 2 February release of a "closely kept list of 400 stars that are their brightest and best bets so far for harboring planets, some of which could turn out to be the smallest and most Earth-like worlds discovered out there to date."

Overbye adds that the planets on this list "represent the first glimpse of riches to come in a quest that is as old as the imagination and as new as the iPad," and that over "the next two or three years, as Kepler continues to stare and sift, astronomers say, it will be able to detect planets in the 'Goldilocks' zones, where it is neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water."

In this lengthy article, heavily illustrated after the "jump" to an interior page, Overbye presents Kepler as only an early part of "a multidecade quest—employing ever more sophisticated and expensive spacecraft—for planets and life beyond Earth." In what may be an example of excessive alarm in science news reporting, he suggests a special purpose for this quest: humanity "will eventually lose Earth as its home, whether because of global warming or the ultimate plague or a killer asteroid or the Sun's inevitable demise. Before then, if we want the universe to remember us or even know we were here, we need to get away."

He summarizes the history of exoplanet discovery since the first in 1995, and then describes Kepler's mission: "Its gaze is fixed on a patch of sky about 20 full moons across near the Northern Cross, in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, containing about 4.5 million stars. . . . The job is simply to measure the brightness of 156,000 of those stars every half-hour, looking for the repeated dips caused by planet crossings, or 'transits.'"

Overbye also explains the statistical nature of the findings: "Natalie Batalha of San Jose State University, the deputy science team leader for Kepler, said it could be that they will wind up with, say, 100 planets they are 80 percent sure of, which could translate to 80 planets—useful for a census, not so helpful if you're looking for a place to live."

Though it doesn't come at the end, the quotation Overbye secured from the UC Berkeley astronomer Geoffrey Marcy could have served as the capper: "We will find Earth-size planets in habitable zones."

George Will speaks up for STEM education

An earlier report described criticisms that followed George F. Will's forceful advocacy of federal research spending and the principles of the Gathering Storm reports. Will's Washington Post column's rejection of the climate consensus, it was charged, not only disqualifies him from supporting science generally, but renders him a general proponent of anti-science.

Question: Will more such criticism follow his recent column echoing scientists' alarm about education, in particular STEM education?

Will begins with a sardonic epigraph—a quotation from Norman Augustine, who led creation of the Gathering Storm reports: "Since 1995 the average mathematics score for fourth-graders jumped 11 points. At this rate we catch up with Singapore in a little over 80 years . . . assuming they don't improve." The column argues for greater state flexibility in meeting national educational goals—and for national metrics, since sometimes states define proficiency down. In the process, Will praises Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

Also in the process, Will offers a three-paragraph-long litany of discouraging data of the kind familiar to all who follow the STEM issue. A sample sentence from this litany: "Among the 34 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations, only four (Mexico, Spain, Turkey and New Zealand) have dropout rates higher than America's, whose 15-year-olds ranked 23rd in math and 25th in science in 2006." Another: "A National Academy of Sciences report says that in 2000, more foreign students than American students were studying engineering and the physical sciences in US graduate schools."

Whatever Will's views on climate science, surely it's useful for him to raise his conservative voice in support of improving STEM education.

Science magazine: Creationism not defeated after all?

The headline on a commentary in the 28 January issue of Science telegraphs the message from the authors, two Penn State political scientists: "Defeating Creationism in the Courtroom, But Not in the Classroom."

Michael B. Berkman and Eric Plutzer begin by recalling the Pennsylvania court case Kitzmiller v. Dover, in which "creationists lost decisively" when a court held that intelligent design is "an effort to advance a religious view via public schools"—and is not science. However: "We suggest," write Berkman and Plutzer, "that the cheering was premature and the victory incomplete."

Under the subheading "Systematic Undermining of Science," the authors continue:

Creationism has lost every major U.S. federal court case for the past 40 years, and state curricular standards have improved. But considerable research suggests that supporters of evolution, scientific methods, and reason itself are losing battles in America's classrooms. . . . The data reveal a pervasive reluctance of teachers to forthrightly explain evolutionary biology. The data further expose a cycle of ignorance in which community antievolution attitudes are perpetuated by teaching that reinforces local community sentiment.

The authors "estimate that 28% of all biology teachers consistently implement the major recommendations and conclusions of the National Research Council: They unabashedly introduce evidence that evolution has occurred and craft lesson plans so that evolution is a theme that unifies disparate topics in biology." They write also that at "the opposite extreme are 13% of the teachers surveyed who explicitly advocate creationism or intelligent design by spending at least 1 hour of class time presenting it in a positive light." They continue:

But if mainstream science and the modern creationist movement each have their classroom allies, they still account for only about 40% of all high school biology teachers. What of the majority of teachers, the "cautious 60%," who are neither strong advocates for evolutionary biology nor explicit endorsers of nonscientific alternatives? Our data show that these teachers understandably want to avoid controversy. Often they have not taken a course in evolution and they lack confidence in their ability to defend it.

The article reports three "especially common" strategies teachers use "for avoiding controversy," and declare that "each has the effect of undermining science." They explain, and then summarize this way:

The cautious 60% may play a far more important role in hindering scientific literacy in the United States than the smaller number of explicit creationists. The strategies of emphasizing microevolution, justifying the curriculum on the basis of state-wide tests, or "teaching the controversy" all undermine the legitimacy of findings that are well established by the combination of peer review and replication. These teachers fail to explain the nature of scientific inquiry, undermine the authority of established experts, and legitimize creationist arguments, even if unintentionally.

For this national situation in which, as the authors put it, many students "are not afforded a sound science education," Berkman and Plutzer cite research to bolster suggestions for several countermeasures. These include "continued participation in federal law suits," curricular and standard-establishing involvement by scientists and scientific organizations, and an "increased focus . . . on preservice teachers." The authors predict that "[b]etter understanding of the field should provide [teachers] with more confidence to teach evolution forthrightly, even in communities where public opinion is sympathetic to creationism."

They also suggest that "[m]ore effectively integrating evolution into the education of preservice biology teachers may also have the indirect effect of encouraging students who cannot accept evolution as a matter of faith to pursue other careers." They elaborate:

Effective programs directed at preservice teachers can therefore both reduce the number of evolution deniers in the nation's classrooms, increase the number who would gladly accept help in teaching evolution, and increase the number of cautious teachers who are nevertheless willing to embrace rigorous standards. This would reduce the supply of teachers who are especially attractive to the most conservative school districts, weakening the cycle of ignorance.

Berkman and Plutzer close by asserting that improved teacher training "offers our best chance of increasing the science literacy of future generations."

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the Media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.

• An update on Fox News's coverage of global warming
• Coverage of one physicist's civic bravery in chaotic Pakistan
• Excerpts of interest to the physics community from the president's State of the Union speech
• A Washington Post columnist's endorsement of federal science funding
• A New York Times commentary about the uncertain outlook for NASA
• A Wall Street Journal front-page article about redefining the international standard for the kilogram

Climate science at Fox News

Two recent online articles might constitute something of an update on how Fox News presents climate science to its audience.

Following recent headlines about 2010 tying for the warmest year on record, Fox posted the article "Five Reasons the Planet May Not Be Its Hottest Ever." Here's an unsurprising observation that nevertheless requires mentioning: Fox's reasons, its cited authorities (for example, Roy Spencer and Lord Monckton), and the scientific quality of its documentation would generally provoke—or already have provoked—energetic dispute at, for example, RealClimate.

Fox begins by questioning the ways in which the temperature data have been processed, and repeats the charge that some data have been skewed by instruments' nearness to artificial sources of heat. The article uses sarcasm to introduce its second reason: "There's less ice is [sic] in the oceans. Or more. Or something." Fox offers a sort of global equilibrium as the actual answer. The third reason: "El Niño has been playing havoc with temperatures." Fourth: "Besides, it's getting chilly." Last year "may have been a warm" one, this fourth reason's passage says, "but 2011 has been off to a very cold start—and may be among the coldest in decades." The article is dated 24 January 2011.

Fox's fifth reason, "Forecasts are often wrong," leads to a link to a second article, "Eight Botched Environmental Forecasts," posted on 30 December.

"FoxNews.com," the second article begins, "has compiled eight of the most egregiously mistaken predictions, and asked the predictors to reflect on what really happened." The predictions range back as far as two Earth Day statements from 1970. None is presented as having come from a scientific publication. Instead, the predictions' sources, besides the Earth Day statements, are the UK Independent, "'Dead Heat' from St. Martin's Press," the Christian Science Monitor, the Associated Press, Life magazine, and a speech at the British Institute for Biology.

Physicist challenges irrationality in Pakistan

In the civic realm, is it scientists who best exemplify rationality? A physicist and social commentator in Pakistan is doing a pretty good job of it. And he's up against opposition far more daunting than Western critics of evolution, childhood vaccines, or climate science.

Physics Today readers might remember Professor Pervez Hoodbhoy's 2007 article "Science and the Islamic World—The Quest for Rapprochement." More recently, he has stood up for rationality following the assassination of the governor of Punjab province, who had spoken out against Pakistan's strict blasphemy laws.

Sunday's Washington Post article "A Governor's Assassination Has Delivered Pakistan to the Extremists" described a post-assassination Pakistan in which posters depict the assassin riding a white horse to heaven, and in which "thousands of people flock each day" to his home. "Pakistan has become a different country," the article says, with the "veneer of Western democracy . . . ripped away" and "the liberal elite . . . cowed into silence."

Cowed into silence? Not physicist Hoodbhoy.

The Post article does mention his past public comments, but consider NPR's 24 January Morning Edition report headlined "Extremist Intimidation Chills Pakistan Secular Society." The piece described, among many other things, a "disturbing [theatrical] production about blasphemy" in Pakistan last week—a play "dedicated . . . to the late governor," a "study in brutality, with white-robed clerics in league with black-clad followers haranguing their victims as they hang them." Here's what comes next in NPR's transcript:

Physicist and social commentator Pervez Hoodbhoy was on hand for the performance.

Mr. PERVEZ HOODBHOY (Physicist, Social Commentator): That this play was shown in Islamabad is an act of courage. This is a country that stands at the very verge of religious fascism.

In Pakistan, the online publication Viewpoint calls its own pages "safe havens for dissenting voices" in "a long history of struggle for democracy, human rights and justice in Pakistan." Recently Viewpoint published a long interview headlined "Pakistan Awaiting the Clerical Tsunami: Pervez Hoodbhoy." As further evidence showing one scientist standing up for rationality, I offer the following excerpts.

Hoodbhoy says, "Those who claim that Pakistan's silent majority is fundamentally secular and tolerant may be clutching at straws."

When asked whether "religious fanatics can dictate their terms even without any parliamentary representation," he answers:

It is indeed a complete abdication. When the bearded ones brought out 50 000 charged people onto the streets of Karachi, a terrified government instantly sought negotiations with them. Even before that happened, the current interior minister—Rahman Malik, a venal hack and as crooked as they come—promptly declared that he'd personally gun down a blasphemer.

Professor Hoodbhoy reports what happened at a post-assassination public event:

Even as the mullahs frothed and screamed around me (and at me), I managed to say the obvious: that the culture of religious extremism was resulting in a bloodbath in which the majority of victims were Muslims; that non-Muslims were fleeing Pakistan; that the self-appointed "thaikaydars" of Islam in Pakistan were deliberately ignoring the case of other Muslim countries like Indonesia which do not have the death penalty for blasphemy; that debating the details of Blasphemy Law 295-C did not constitute blasphemy; that American Muslims were very far from being the objects of persecution; that harping on drone attacks was an irrelevancy to the present discussion on blasphemy.

The response? Not a single clap for me. Thunderous applause whenever my opponents called for death for blasphemers. And loud cheers for Qadri. When I directly addressed Sialvi and said he had Salman Taseer's blood on his hand, he exclaimed "How I wish I had done it!" (kaash ke main nay khud kiya hota!). You can find all this on YouTube if you like.

One can debate whether this particular episode (and probably many similar ones) should be blamed on the media, whether it genuinely reflects the public mood, and whether those students fairly represented the general Pakistani youth. But there is little doubt which side the Pakistani media took. This was apparent from the unwillingness of anchors to condemn the assassination, as well as from images of the smiling murderer being feted all around. Mullah guests filled the screens of most channels. Some journalists and TV-show participants favorably compared Qadri with Ilm-e-Deen. Others sought to prove that Taseer somehow brought his death upon himself.

A comment from later in the interview:

Ours is an apartheid society where the rich treat the poor like dirt, the justice system does not work, education is as rotten as it can be, and visible corruption goes unpunished. Add to all this a million mullahs in a million mosques who exploit people's frustrations. You then have the explanation for today's catastrophic situation.

Of course I would love to see the Americans out of Afghanistan. The sooner they can withdraw—without precipitating a 1996 style Taliban massacre—the better. But let's realize that US withdrawal will not end Pakistan's problems. Those fighting the Americans aren't exactly Vietnamese-type socialists or nationalists. The Taliban-types want a full cultural revolution: beards, burqas, 5 daily prayers, no music, no art, no entertainment, and no contact with modernity except for getting its weapons.

And finally, here's Professor Hoodbhoy's answer to the question "What do you think is the way to stem the rising tide of religious extremism in Pakistan?"

If you want the truth: the answer is, nothing. Our goose is cooked. Sometimes there is no way to extinguish a forest fire until it burns itself out. Ultimately there will be nothing left to burn. But well before the last liberal is shot or silenced, the mullahs will be gunning for each other in a big way. Mullah-inspired bombers have already started blowing up shrines and mosques of the opposing sect. The internet is flooded with gory photographs of chopped-up body parts belonging to their rivals. Qadri, the assassin, admitted his inspiration to murder came from a cleric. So you can also expect that Muslim clerics will enthusiastically kill other Muslim clerics. Eventually we could have the situation that prevailed during Europe's 30-Year War.

To save Pakistan, what miracles shall we ask of Allah? Here's my personal list: First, that the Pakistan army stops seeing India as enemy number one and starts seeing extremism as a mortal threat. Second, that Zardari's government is replaced by one that is less corrupt, more capable of governance, and equipped with both the will and legitimacy to challenge religious fascism. And, third, that peace somehow comes to Afghanistan.

Science- and STEM-related excerpts from the State of the Union speech

Here are three excerpts (two long, one short) of interest to the physics community from the text of President Obama's address as prepared for delivery.

. . .

The first step in winning the future is encouraging American innovation. None of us can predict with certainty what the next big industry will be, or where the new jobs will come from. Thirty years ago, we couldn't know that something called the Internet would lead to an economic revolution. What we can do—what America does better than anyone—is spark the creativity and imagination of our people. We are the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook. In America, innovation doesn't just change our lives. It's how we make a living.

Our free enterprise system is what drives innovation. But because it's not always profitable for companies to invest in basic research, throughout history our government has provided cutting-edge scientists and inventors with the support that they need. That's what planted the seeds for the Internet. That's what helped make possible things like computer chips and GPS.

Just think of all the good jobs—from manufacturing to retail—that have come from those breakthroughs.

Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik¸ we had no idea how we'd beat them to the moon. The science wasn't there yet. NASA didn't even exist. But after investing in better research and education, we didn't just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs.

This is our generation's Sputnik moment. Two years ago, I said that we needed to reach a level of research and development we haven't seen since the height of the Space Race. In a few weeks, I will be sending a budget to Congress that helps us meet that goal. We'll invest in biomedical research, information technology, and especially clean energy technology—an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet, and create countless new jobs for our people.

. . .

We're telling America's scientists and engineers that if they assemble teams of the best minds in their fields, and focus on the hardest problems in clean energy, we'll fund the Apollo Projects of our time.

At the California Institute of Technology, they're developing a way to turn sunlight and water into fuel for our cars. At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, they're using supercomputers to get a lot more power out of our nuclear facilities. With more research and incentives, we can break our dependence on oil with biofuels, and become the first country to have 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.

We need to get behind this innovation. And to help pay for it, I'm asking Congress to eliminate the billions in taxpayer dollars we currently give to oil companies. I don't know if you've noticed, but they're doing just fine on their own. So instead of subsidizing yesterday's energy, let's invest in tomorrow's.

Now, clean energy breakthroughs will only translate into clean energy jobs if businesses know there will be a market for what they're selling. So tonight, I challenge you to join me in setting a new goal: by 2035, 80% of America's electricity will come from clean energy sources. Some folks want wind and solar. Others want nuclear, clean coal, and natural gas. To meet this goal, we will need them all—and I urge Democrats and Republicans to work together to make it happen.

Maintaining our leadership in research and technology is crucial to America's success. But if we want to win the future—if we want innovation to produce jobs in America and not overseas—then we also have to win the race to educate our kids.

Think about it. Over the next ten years, nearly half of all new jobs will require education that goes beyond a high school degree. And yet, as many as a quarter of our students aren't even finishing high school. The quality of our math and science education lags behind many other nations. America has fallen to 9th in the proportion of young people with a college degree. And so the question is whether all of us—as citizens, and as parents—are willing to do what's necessary to give every child a chance to succeed.

That responsibility begins not in our classrooms, but in our homes and communities. It's family that first instills the love of learning in a child. Only parents can make sure the TV is turned off and homework gets done. We need to teach our kids that it's not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated, but the winner of the science fair; that success is not a function of fame or PR, but of hard work and discipline.

Our schools share this responsibility. When a child walks into a classroom, it should be a place of high expectations and high performance. But too many schools don't meet this test. That's why instead of just pouring money into a system that's not working, we launched a competition called Race to the Top. To all fifty states, we said, "If you show us the most innovative plans to improve teacher quality and student achievement, we'll show you the money."

Race to the Top is the most meaningful reform of our public schools in a generation. For less than one percent of what we spend on education each year, it has led over 40 states to raise their standards for teaching and learning. These standards were developed, not by Washington, but by Republican and Democratic governors throughout the country. And Race to the Top should be the approach we follow this year as we replace No Child Left Behind with a law that is more flexible and focused on what's best for our kids.

You see, we know what's possible for our children when reform isn't just a top-down mandate, but the work of local teachers and principals; school boards and communities.

. . .

And over the next ten years, with so many Baby Boomers retiring from our classrooms, we want to prepare 100,000 new teachers in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math.

Fareed Zakaria: "Obama should propose doubling federal spending on research and innovation"

What will President Obama say about science and research in the State of the Union speech? From among the conjecturing, a passage from the Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria seems worth singling out and quoting. His 24 January column discusses what he calls the president's "opportunity to craft a genuinely bipartisan pro-growth strategy for America," by which Zakaria says he means "a strategy for long-term growth." Here's the passage of interest for science:

The Obama administration, concerned about the dramatic slowdown in drug development, is proposing a new federal research center with a $1 billion budget. A good idea, but US officials should look at the regulatory framework surrounding the process of discovery and development, since the private sector spends more than 50 times that sum every year on drug research. The Food and Drug Administration takes twice as long to approve a drug as its European counterparts. As a result, health-care research has been moving offshore, particularly as China and India innovate in every product and process.

If Republicans are correct in their worries about being competitive on regulations and taxes, Democrats are right about the need to increase federal spending on research and development. People are watching China's aggressive investments in clean technology, high-speed rail and telecommunications and wondering if they will work. They should look at US history: Without federal investment in R&D, America would not have become the world's leader in information technology. The semiconductor industry was created because of Defense Department demand and later rescued by the Reagan administration in a series of measures that can only be called industrial policy. NASA was critical in the growth of the computer science industry. Al Gore may not have invented the Internet, but DARPA—the Pentagon's venture capital arm—did.

During the Cold War, the United States spent 3% of its gross domestic product on research and development; the government and private sector each contributed about half. Today, the private sector spends a bit more but government spends less. Obama should propose doubling federal spending on research and innovation. Three percent might have been enough in the 1950s, when Americans could still get millions of jobs in basic manufacturing. Jobs of the future lie in knowledge industries, and that means doing better than we did in the 1950s at knowledge creation.

Kenneth Chang at the New York Times: NASA's future a "muddle"

With the Constellation program for a lunar return ended, with the shuttle program ending, and with other programs underfunded, says Kenneth Chang of the New York Times, NASA's future appears muddled and discouraging. Chang's commentary "For NASA, Longest Countdown Awaits" appears below the fold on the front of the 25 January Science Times section.

The commentary reports the numbers as it discusses various dimensions of NASA's effort to find its way within a budget situation that seriously mismatches ambitions and resources. "Congress has asked NASA to build a heavy-lift rocket," Chang notes, "one that can go deep into space carrying big loads. But NASA says it cannot possibly build such a rocket with the budget and schedule it has been given." Moreover, another "crucial component of NASA's new mission—helping commercial companies develop space taxis for taking astronauts into orbit—is getting less money than the Obama administration requested."

Chang quotes a recent panel report: "The Congress, the White House, and NASA must quickly reach a consensus position on the future of the agency and the future of the United States in space."

He also quotes discouraging words from various sources. A NASA official concerning NASA's future: "It's hard at this point to speculate." A former NASA official: "We're on a path with an increasing probability of a bad outcome." A space policy consultant on the situation overall: "a train wreck . . . where everyone involved knows it's a train wreck."

Chang's final sentence: "As for the ultimate goal of landing people on Mars, which President Obama said he wanted NASA to accomplish by the mid-2030s, it is even slipping further into the future."

Physics on the Wall Street Journal front page

Physics—specifically, metrological physics—has not only made the front page of the Wall Street Journal, it has made the 28 January A-Hed, the WSJ's traditional daily, below-the-fold article that, the WSJ says, ranges "from the silly to the serious, and from the quirky to the downright bizarre" and "gives free rein to ... reporters' imagination," making the WSJ the only newspaper that "has ever institutionalized wit and humor as an essential part of its front page."

A few light, whimsical touches do appear in the article "The Fate of the Kilo Weighs Heavily on the Minds of Metrologists: Moves Are Afoot to Redefine Measurements; Le Grand K Feels a Wee Bit Lighter." But it's actually a serious report on the problem of minuscule loss of mass in the international standard for the kilogram.

In the 18th century, when metrology was becoming both a serious science and an important technological step, Thomas Jefferson and others called for standards to be devised based on natural principles rather than on human-made objects. That's the approach reported on in this article.

Though the opening conflates weight and mass, it does present the problem:

In a vault beneath a 17th-century pavilion on the outskirts of Paris sits a platinum cylinder known as Le Grand K. Since 1889 it has been the international prototype for the kilogram, the standard against which all other kilos are measured.

But over the years, scientists have noticed a problem: Le Grand K has been losing weight. Weigh-ins at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures show that the bar has shed approximately 50 micrograms—roughly equal to a grain of sand.

The problem has vexed scientists who monitor the kilo the way tabloids track the waistlines of Valerie Bertinelli and Kirstie Alley. The stakes, however, are weightier.

"It's a scandal that we've got this kilogram hanging around changing its mass and therefore changing the mass of everything else in the universe!" Bill Phillips, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, exclaimed at a scientific summit in London this week. No one knows for sure what went wrong with Le Grand K, but some theorize it lost weight from being cleaned.

The solution, of course, is to switch standards and to use the principle that Jefferson and others prescribed. The article notes that "the meter, for instance, was once measured as the distance between two notches on a metal bar," but "is now defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second." (If I recall correctly, that's a standard set by a certain atomic vibration.) A correspondingly new definition of the kilogram, the article reports, "hinges on first determining an exact value for" the Planck constant, which can then be used formulaically. But despite "extending to an impressive eight decimal places," the article notes, "the number has been deemed imprecise by some."

Since the article is the A-Hed, it veers off for some gags that aren't quite science-nerd gags, but that do poke fun at the arcane activities of the international General Conference on Weights and Measures. (Example: "And when the French astronomer Bernard Guinot asked how much time he had left to conclude his speech, no one seemed to know.") Nevertheless the article also reports that "much is riding on the outcome" of this kind of work. The "joule, watt, volt, farad, weber and ohm are only some of the units derived in part from the kilo," it says.

The article's ending might merit quoting:

Several dozen copies of the original are stored at national laboratories around the globe. Once every 50 years or so, scientists carry the copies by hand to Sèvres, just outside Paris, in little boxes, to compare them to the original. At the most recent summit in 1989, they noticed that the kilos differed by an average of about 50 micrograms. This is often described as Le Grand K losing mass, though to be precise, it's possible that the copies had gained mass.

Putting a stop to such vagary is what the new definitions are all about. But when one journalist asked whether they would help bring stability to an unstable world, Dr. Quinn paused and shook his head: "We have big ambitions, but not as big as that."

If you read my Physics Today online "Point of View" commentary about the physics sitcom The Big Bang Theory, you know I can sometimes be offended at science-nerd gags that go too far. But in this case, my own view is that the WSJ has done science a nice service by presenting this metrology story in the whimsical context of the front-page A-Hed.

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the Media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.

The many path approach

No single technology or policy can produce reductions of 65%, the Pew report asserts. Instead, the US would also need to enact new land-use policies that promote high-density development and adopt ride sharing, car sharing, and “eco-driving” practices such as anticipating traffic situations and maintaining adequate spacing between vehicles to avoid unnecessary braking and acceleration. Without further policy interventions, CO₂ emissions from the US transportation sector will rise 28% from 2010 to 2035, even assuming substantial increases in the use of renewable fuels, according to the US Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration. But, given the austere budget climate and political resistance to regulation, Pew Center president Eileen Claussen warned that further emissions reductions will be an uphill fight. “If we have no money to spend and no mandates, it’s unclear what sort of policies we can have.”

Steven Plotkin, a researcher at Argonne National Laboratory who coauthored the report, said many of the technologies for lowering CO<->2<-> emissions are already available from the same manufacturers that had once declared them to be impossible. Turbocharged four-cylinder engines, for example, are able to replace six-cylinder power plants; with no decline in performance and with reduced emissions. Lithium ion cathode technology licensed from Argonne is being used to improve the performance and increase the safety of the batteries being manufactured by South Korea’s LG Chem for the Chevrolet Volt.

A multiple-path approach would work best because of uncertainty about which technology will provide the biggest payoffs in emissions reductions. Game changers such as the lithium-air battery chemistry being pursued by Argonne could give electric vehicles the same sort of range between charges as conventional gasoline-powered cars have.

One piece of the puzzle

But coauthor David Greene, of the Howard H Baker Jr Center for Public Policy, said the gains in light-vehicle efficiency have yet to be reflected in other modes of transportation. Little progress has been made on alternative fuels and fuel efficiency in commercial air transport, trains, or heavy-duty trucks. The comprehensive approach is unlikely to be followed until the public is convinced that global warming is a reality.

Public policies such as a tax on carbon emissions are needed to provide market signals, Plotkin noted. He said that the price of gasoline will become considerably less important to the owners of cars getting 75 or more miles per gallon than to the drivers of existing generation vehicles. And it will be cars at the more efficient end of that scale that will be competing against electric or fuel-cell vehicles.

David Kramer