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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday announced that three prominent US scientists have been named “science envoys” to arrange scientific collaborations between the US and countries in North Africa, the Middle East, and in south and southeast Asia.

Former National Academy of Sciences president Bruce Alberts, former National Institutes of Health director Elias Zerhouni and Ahmed Zewail, a Nobel laureate professor of chemistry and physics at Caltech, will travel to the regions “to foster scientific and technological collaborations,” Clinton said in a speech delivered in Marrakech, Morocco.

The US also will expand the number of science, technology, environment, and health officers positions at its embassies by an unspecified number. And the government’s Overseas Private Investment Corp is to establish a “global technology and innovation fund” to finance S&T collaborations, she said.

“It was the Islamic world that led the way in science and medicine. It was the Islamic world that paved the way for much of the technology and science that we now take for granted,” Clinton said. “We want to look to your societies and we want to help Muslim majority communities develop the capacity to meet economic, social and ecological challenges through science, technology, and innovation.”

The measures come five months after President Obama promised to increase cooperation with Muslim-majority nations during a June speech at Cairo University.

Two of the envoys are foreign-born—Zewail is Egyptian and Zerhouni is Algerian—while Alberts spent much of his 12 years as NAS president engaging with science academies throughout the world. Zewail is also a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Responding to a question he posed during PCAST’s 22 October meeting, State Department science adviser Nina Federoff said the amount of US foreign assistance devoted to science and technology is “minuscule, probably not much more than a couple hundred million dollars, which is pathetic.” While funding is sparse, Federoff said a bright spot is a memorandum of understanding between the US Agency for International Development and the National Science Foundation, which commits the two to co-fund collaborations between US scientists and their counterparts in developing nations.

To complement the science envoys program, Federoff said her office is implementing a new “embassy science and entrepreneur fellows” program where scientists from other federal agencies, as well as university fellows already working at State, are assigned to certain US embassies for periods of up to three months.

In his Cairo speech, Obama promised additional steps to elevate S&T cooperation with Muslim, African and Southeast Asian countries, including “centers of scientific excellence,” and expanded scientific exchanges and scholarships.

In August, Obama further signaled his interest in aligning US S&T with foreign policy, directing his national security and economic advisers to reevaluate US foreign aid policy to take into account such global factors as climate change and natural resource scarcities.

David Kramer

Related Politics & Policy link
Progress for Obama's science diplomacy

A brief roundup of policy news stories last week indicates that political temperatures are rising in the run up to new climate talks, and that Iran is slowly becoming more flexible over opening up its nuclear program.

Climate bill faces hurdles in Senate
The climate-change bill that has been moving slowly through the Senate will face a stark political reality when it emerges for committee debate on Tuesday reports the Washington Post: With Democrats deeply divided on the issue, unless some Republican lawmakers risk the backlash for signing on to the legislation, there is almost no hope for passage.

US Envoy: No bilateral climate deal with China
Todd Stern, President Obama's envoy for climate change has dashed hopes of a bilateral deal on climate change during this month's presidential trip to China in an interview with NPR's Louisa Lim.

"There is no agreement per se," Stern says, adding that there had been no intention of cutting a separate bilateral deal.

Obama's trip will focus on clean energy cooperation, and aligning Chinese and American positions ahead of the upcoming global climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The US is pushing for China to cut its greenhouse gas emissions.

"They absolutely have to cap their emissions in the sense of having them reduced significantly as compared to where their trend line is," Stern said. "China could make a reduction twice as ambitious as the US is doing, and that would still involve their emissions going up somewhere from where they are now."

But Beijing is resisting US pressure, arguing that it is using other measures. It already has announced a goal of improving energy efficiency by 20 percent by 2010. China also is planting trees over an area the size of California.

Jiahua Pan of the Institute for Urban & Environmental Studies in, Beijing says that negotiations will depend largely on decisive mitigation action being taken by the developed nations. China will have every reason to follow suit if the rich nations demonstrate leadership and commit to more substantial cuts than they have offered so far.

India pushes for common responsibility
Rajendra K. Pachauri says in Nature that India wants to be a constructive partner in Copenhagen negotiations on climate change. The country is taking domestic action even though it cannot accept mandatory emissions limits.

UN inspectors visit uranium enrichment facility in Iran
UN inspectors have received their first formal look inside Iran's once-secret uranium enrichment facility that has raised western suspicions about the extent of their nuclear program.

The semi-official Mehr news agency reported that the four-member team visited the heavily protected facility, carved into a mountainside south of Tehran. The tour marked the first independent examination of the site, but no conclusions about the state of the facility are expected until after the next IAEA committee meeting.

Chart: How the ‘Darpa for Energy’ is slicing its $150-Million pie
Wired.com has created a chart describing which area's the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency will be handing out more than $150 million for what the agency describes as “bold, transformational” energy projects (see also DOE awards 'Smart Grid' and ARPA-E grants).

President Obama's 28 October announcement of $3.4 billion in grants to begin a major upgrading of the US electricity grid came a day after the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) grant program at DOE named the winners of its first $151 million in grants to support 37 high-risk research projects that could advance novel clean energy technologies.

The 100 "smart grid" grants will begin a modernization of the US electrical generation, transmission, and distribution system--a process that when completed will save consumers $20 billion over 10 years on their utility bills, Obama said. Ranging from $200 million to less than $1 million, the awards will pay for utilities to install 18 million "smart" meters, covering 13% of US homes--devices that will allow customers to monitor their electricity use in real time, and as utilities begin to move to dynamic electricity pricing, to program new smart appliances to operate when rates are low.

The awards will also pay for the replacement of 200,000 transformers and the automation of 700 substations--5% of the US total--improvements that will allow utilities to respond faster and more effectively to restore service after power interruptions. More than 850 sensors called phasor measurement units are to be installed, providing improved monitoring of conditions on the grid and helping prevent minor disturbances from cascading into power outages or blackouts. Awardees, who were chosen from 400 grant applicants, are putting up another $4.7 billion of their own capital for the grid upgrades.

Chu traveled to Google Inc's Mountain View, California, headquarters to unveil the ARPA-E grants, which are to support R&D for especially high-risk, but potentially high-payoff concepts for producing clean energy. All 37 awards went for projects proposed by universities or to small and large companies, though a number of DOE national laboratories were teamed with awardees. ARPA-E will award its remaining fiscal year 2010 funding of $249 million through a second solicitation later this year. As with the smart grid program, ARPA-E's resources are from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

"We're here to announce a portfolio of bold new research projects, any one of which could do for energy what Google did for the Internet," Chu said. Renewable energy, energy storage, industrial and building efficiency, petroleum-free vehicles, and carbon capture are all represented. DOE received 3700 responses--"a stunning level of interest"-- Chu said, when it first solicited expressions of interest in the ARPA-E program in April. The agency invited 300 of those to submit full proposals, which were put before 500 expert reviewers.

David Kramer

The National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Advisory Committee for Geosciences (AC-GEO) has released a new report that calls for re-focusing research in the geosciences in the US.

"For most of its history Earth has experienced vast alterations," states the report, "in response to natural variations in our planet." But humans are now emerging as the dominant agent of change it says.

"It is essential going forward that we have the scientific tools and evidence to understand and anticipate how the Earth will be transformed in the future, and at what rate, in response to these growing pressures," says geoscientist George Davis of the University of Arizona, chair of the AC-GEO.

"To identify these influences and their potential impacts requires an understanding of the Earth, its history, and its systems that's grounded in basic science," he adds.

The report recommends that NSF coordinate US research into these areas. "The [NSF] geosciences directorate must engage other NSF directorates and external partners in an ambitious research program that furthers our understanding of Earth, and provides the basis for objective and sound policy formulation and decision-making," says NSF director Arden L. Bement, Jr.

The challenges ahead for the geosciences, says the report, are:

"We as geoscientists must work to meet the challenge of understanding [the Earth's dynamic and complex interactions], and use that knowledge to advance our [governmental] stewardship of its systems," says Tim Killeen, NSF assistant director for geosciences.

Society as a whole must learn to use a grounded and rational set of guidelines for making decisions regarding environmental and resource management says the report, and "leading many of those discussions will be geoscientists ... who will share their understanding of the Earth system with the public and with decision-makers, providing the scientific knowledge that will ultimately guide society as it comes to understand its evolving relationship with the planet."

The AC-GEO's recommendations for NSF's directorate for geosciences, which has three divisions--atmospheric and geospace sciences; earth sciences; and ocean sciences—are to:

"We as a society face a daunting task," says Killeen. "Through the help of [this report], we will make great strides in realizing a new vision for the geosciences—and for the future of our planet.

Paul Guinnessy

University of Tennessee emeritus professor J. Reece Roth, 71, was sentenced to four years in prison last week for breaking the Arms Export Control Act reports the Knoxville News Sentinel

Roth was prosecuted for allowing two graduate research assistants—one from Iran and one from China—to access sensitive military arms information related to a US Air Force contract on studying the use of plasma technology on unmanned military aircraft. Roth also disclosed some of his research in lectures given abroad in China.

US District Judge Tom Varlan said Roth's actions could have caused "harm to the security of the United States." The Air Force scrapped the research project, although there was no testimony at Roth's trial last year that any foreign government had accessed the information or that Roth ever had tried to sell or give the information to foreign governments says reporter Jamie Satterfield.

Roth was twice warned by UT officials about the following law before he was arrested.

Paul Guinnessy

Related Link
Ex-UT prof gets 4 years for mishandling defense secrets