Recently in Science education Category

A new web site called ScienceWorksForUS, has been launched that highlights research and science-related funding from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The data for the site was gathered by a group called the Science Coalition in collaboration with the Association of American Universities and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities.

"This [funding] reflects what’s possible when smart investments in the public sector are placed in the hands of our scientists, innovators, and academies of higher learning," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who was at a press conference launching the site. "We will ensure that the Recovery Act was not the end of our investment in innovation, but the beginning of a sustained commitment to science," she added.

The stimulus contained $21.5 billion for scientific research, the purchase of capital equipment and science-related construction projects.

This money is less than 3 percent of the $787 billion stimulus measure.

"These research projects—large and small—are making a difference in hundreds of local communities by providing jobs for researchers, lab technicians, and graduate students," said University of Arizona President Robert Shelton.

Long-term impact

“When we invested nearly $22 billion in the Recovery Bill for scientific discovery, we set the stage not just for job creation today, but for the economic growth of tomorrow," said Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), co-chair of the Congressional Research and Development Caucus. "It is vital for our long-term economic prosperity that we maintain this robust commitment to scientific research and development."

How strong this commitment is from the Obama administration will clearly be seen in next year's budget. All the federal agencies have been asked to create two budgets, one with flat spending at 2009 levels (excluding stimulus funds) and the other with a 5% cut from 2009 levels.

Paul Guinnessy

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

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

The last couple of months have seen some significant budget cuts hitting the public university system, with California's universities being hit particularly hard.

Earlier this week California cut university funding by 20% ($813 million), creating a funding deficit for the university.

As part of fixing the deficit, the University of California Board of Regents implemented a scheme that effectively cut staff salaries by 8% (through a mixture of furloughs of two days each month and salary decreases) and by refinancing existing debt.

UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau said during his testimony before the UC Board of Regents on 29 July that the furloughs will save 450 staff positions at Berkeley, but the continued cuts are not sustainable. Other UC chancellors agree. On top of the furloughs, each individual institution was asked to make additional sacrifices.

The student/adviser ratio will move from 300:1 to exceed 500:1, said UC Davis chancellor Larry Vanderhoef at the same meeting. Moreover, increasing the teaching and administrative workload of staff may decrease research output, said UCLA Chancellor Gene Block.

Block also said that they had cut 428 positions at UCLA, including 36 ladder faculty, 95 lecturers, and 109 teaching assistants. Reductions will increase during the current fiscal year, he added, and there will be fewer opportunities for faculty advancement.

On top of the staffing cuts, the regents increased student tuition by more than 32% for undergraduate degrees, to $4800 per year, and plans to cut enrollment by 40,000 students. The number of courses and services (such as extended opening times for libraries) available at UC campuses will also be cut on average by 10%.

UC President Mark G. Yudof renewed his call for both shared sacrifice and forward-looking innovation within the 10-campus system to balance the budget, particularly in light of an additional $335 million in increased costs from 11,000 extra students who enrolled this year, higher utility and health-care costs, and collective bargaining agreements and faculty merit increases in the 2008-09 and 2009-10 fiscal years.

"We're doing all we can to minimize the impact of these cuts on the quality of all we do," said Yudof, who announced a committee to look at the long-term financial and strategic direction of the UC university system. "This pattern of annual cuts in state funding is unsustainable."

Paul Guinnessy

Lord Mandelson, the head of the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills which runs the universities, has announced a plan to expand by 10,000 the number of university places for science-related courses, but has refused to provide additional funds to science departments to teach them. Students will receive the standard grants and loans to pay their tuition costs.

“Our expansion of higher education is more important now than ever as we continue to invest in a highly skilled workforce to win the jobs of the future and lead the way in building Britain’s future,” said Mandelson in a statement to the UK parliament. 

The recession has caused university placements in the UK to be wildly oversubscribed—applications are up more than 10% this year. However, due to last year’s budget overspending on education by £200 million, the government introduced a cap on the number of students who could go to university. These new places exceed this cap and will be funded through budget cuts and through cutting the repayment holiday that students can take from five years before repayment to two years. “This is a fiscally neutral change,” said Mandelson.

Universities UK, the umbrella group for vice-chancellors, gave the extra placements a cautious welcome. "We understand the thinking behind tying the student support to the STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) agenda at the current time," said Diana Warwick, chief executive of Universities UK, "however we would be concerned if this were, in future, to have a negative impact on areas such as the social sciences, arts and humanities."

Wendy Piatt, director general of the Russell Group, an association of the 20 most research intensive universities in the UK, said: “The Russell Group supports the Government’s longstanding aim to ensure that more students get the opportunity to benefit from going to university.  However, any growth in the number of students must be funded in a sustainable way that will not create real and long term difficulties for UK universities and undermine the quality of the student experience.”

“Maintaining quality is sacrosanct. Subjects like engineering and science are particularly expensive to teach and we know that there is already a funding shortfall for teaching at Russell Group universities,” he added. “As a recent government study¹ has highlighted, without further investment the ‘quality of the student experience and the reputation and contribution of English higher education will suffer.’"

Paul Guinnessy

(1) The Sustainability of Teaching in English Higher Education, a report by the TRAC Strategy Group chaired by Professor Geoffrey Crossick, warden of Goldsmiths, University of London, and supported by JM Consulting.

A new report by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press finds that overwhelming majorities of Americans believe that science has had a positive effect on society and that science has made life easier for most people. The public—even those skeptical of some scientific conclusions on such topics as climate change and evolution—rates scientists highly and believes government investments in science pay off in the long term.

But the study, of 3000 members of the public and 2500 members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), also finds that the public has a far less positive view of the global standing of US science than do scientists themselves. As the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing approaches, just 17% say US scientific achievements rate as the best in the world, compared with nearly half (49%) of scientists who hold that view.

Key findings include:

Science Slips as Nation's Greatest Achievement. Significantly fewer Americans volunteer scientific advances as one of the country's most important achievements than did so a decade ago (27% today, 47% in May 1999). Then, 18% cited space exploration and the Moon landing as the country's top achievement in the 20th century; now, 12% see it as the greatest achievement in the past 50 years.

Public, Scientists Agree on Government Role in Funding Research. Fully 84% of scientists name government as a top source of research funding in their specialty. Large majorities of the public think that government investments in basic scientific research (73%) and engineering and technology (74%) pay off in the long run, and 60% says that government investment in research is essential for scientific progress. Majorities of both Democrats (80%) and Republicans (68%) say that government investments in basic science pay off in the long term.

But Substantial Gaps Exist on Evolution and Climate Change. Most notably, 87% of scientists—but just 32% of Americans in general—say that humans and other living things have evolved over time and that evolution is the result of natural processes such as natural selection. A large gap also exists on the issue of climate change; 84% of scientists—but just 49% of the public—say that Earth is getting warmer because of human activity.

Politics and Science. Majorities of both the public and the scientists say that it is appropriate for scientists to take part in political debates about issues such as nuclear power and stem cell research. But they differ in their views on many of these issues. Scientists are much more likely than the public to support the expansion of nuclear power, federal funding of stem cell research, and the use of animals in research. One recent political controversy—charges that the Bush administration censored government scientists—was largely invisible to the public, as 54% said they heard nothing about it. On the other hand, most scientists (55%) say they had heard a lot about it, and 77% believe that the charges are true.

Scientists Highly Regarded, Even By Those Skeptical of Scientific Conclusions. Scientists are very highly rated compared with members of other professions; only members of the military and teachers are more likely to be viewed as contributing a lot to society's well-being. More than two-thirds (67%) of those who say science conflicts with their religious beliefs still say that scientists contribute a lot to the well-being of society. A similar proportion (63%) of those who accept a creationist view on the origins of life say scientists have contributed a great deal to society, compared with 78% who accept the theory of evolution.

Scientists Fault Public, Media. Fully 85% of scientists see the public's lack of scientific knowledge as a major problem for science, and about three-quarters (76%) say a major problem for science is that news reports fail to distinguish between findings that are well-founded and those that are not.

But Overall, Scientists Are Upbeat about the State of Their Profession. About three-quarters (76%) say this is generally a good time for science and nearly as many (73%) say it is good time for their scientific specialty. Despite the country's economic problems, 67% say it is a good time to begin a career in their scientific field.

The Public's "Science IQ." Americans are knowledgeable about basic scientific facts that affect their health and their daily lives, but they are less able to answer questions about other science topics. For example, 91% know that aspirin is an over-the-counter drug recommended to prevent heart attacks—but fewer than half (46%) know that electrons are smaller than atoms.

Paul Guinnessy

New enrollments in graduate science and engineering programs at US universities rose by 3.3% in 2007 compared to 2006—nearly twice the growth rate of 2005–06 and the highest increase since 2002, NSF reported.

Full-time enrollments of foreign students, defined as those holding temporary visas, surged to an all-time high and eclipsed the record set in 2001. It’s an indication that post-September 11 restrictions and red tape on student visas have eased.

First-time, full-time enrollments by temporary visa holders in graduate S&E programs grew 8.3% in 2007, the most recent data available, compared with an increase of 1.7% by US citizens and permanent residents that year.

The influx of foreign graduate students was especially pronounced for computer science and engineering, where enrollments grew 12% in 2007 from 2006, to 6275. That followed a 20% surge in new foreign enrollees to those programs that occurred from 2005 to 2006.

The number of US citizens and permanent residents enrolling in the computer fields, meanwhile, fell by 9%, to 3077. As recently as 2005, more than 3600 new US graduates had enrolled in those fields.

Foreign students enrolling in US graduate engineering programs also continue to outnumber new US students. But the number of new enrollments by US students in graduate physical sciences programs grew by 2.5%, slightly, and by 2.3% among visa holders, to 2641.

David Kramer

Related Link
S&E Graduate Enrollments Accelerate in 2007; Enrollments of Foreign Students Reach New High

Even as federal science agencies and the wider science community tried to absorb the possibility of up to $20 billion in new science funding as part of the stimulus package, battles in the Senate to pare down the $900 billion proposal threatened funding for NSF, NASA, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Department of Energy's Office of Science. The science funding differences between the stimulus package passed recently by the House and the scaled-back version on the verge of passage in the Senate were detailed nicely in a piece by Jeffrey Mervis in Science magazine.

Whatever the final numbers, science policy experts are trying to define "shovel-ready" science projects while at the same time get money into the base of science programs so that it will have a long-term effect. "I do think that money of the magnitude being proposed can be spent on useful things," George W. Bush's science adviser, John Marburger, told Mervis. "But it's short-term money. The great danger is creating facilities that no one can afford to operate." Harold Varmus, a former director of NIH and one of President Barack Obama's chief advisers on science, said that, "Not everybody understands that grants create an obligation. So the base is crucial. Obama talked repeatedly during the campaign about gradual and consistent funding for science. Maybe part of this [stimulus] should go into the base."

While the focus this week was on the very partisan fight over the stimulus package, there were some concrete steps by the administration that reversed several of the Bush policies. Obama announced new energy guidelines for household appliances, guidelines that he said would save the equivalent of the energy produced by all coal-fired plants for two years. He called the new standards "a significant down payment" on a clean energy future.

In his remarks, Obama also said he was serious about building a "smarter electricity grid" and leading a "revolution in energy efficiency" by "modernizing more than 75 percent of federal buildings and improving the efficiency of more than 2 million American homes."

Focusing on that theme, RenewableEnergyWorld.com noted that "renewable energy, climate change and green jobs are hot topics around the beltway." The post highlighted discussions around the newly proposed "Markey-Platts Bill," which would boost clean-energy development. The bill would boost renewable energy generation 135 percent above current policies between now and 2025. The Union of Concerned Scientists has a longer posting on the proposed legislation.

The RenewableEnergyWorld piece also details Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer's (D-CA) press conference announcing six broad principles that need to be addressed in upcoming climate change legislation. While climate change legislation is on the agenda, she noted that the timeline is iffy. The goal is to get a cap-and-trade bill passed before the Copenhagen round of climate change negotiations in December.

While Boxer was unsure of how fast climate change legislation could make it through Congress, new energy secretary Steven Chu used a Los Angeles Times interview to warn that if climate change continues unabated, California's agriculture could vanish by the end of the century. "I don't think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen," he told the paper. "We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California." An article about the interview appeared in the Christian Science Monitor.

The WorldWatch Institute also published a piece about the push for climate change legislation under the headline, "Growing Optimism for U.S. Climate Change Bill." "After years of being the last place on Earth to act on climate change, this is our moment," the posting quoted Massachusetts Senator John Kerry as saying. "The science is screaming at us. There is no time to waste. We must learn from the lessons of Kyoto, and we must make Copenhagen a success."

The US Department of the Interior moved to reverse another Bush policy by cancelling energy leases that would have opened lands near national parks in Utah to oil and natural gas drilling. "I have directed [the] Bureau of Land Management not to accept the bids," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told reporters. Environmental groups hailed the decision, while oil and gas industry representatives expressed concern.

The New York Times ran a piece on Obama's approach to dealing with Iran, saying the administration "may take a tough line with Tehran in coming months even as it signals a willingness to move toward direct talks with Iranian officials." This came after Iran announced early in the week that it launched its first satellite into orbit.

Associated Press writer Barry Schweid notes the apparent restart of the START talks with Russia. "Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has notified Congress and her staff that she intends to get started quickly on talks with the Russians, who have voiced interest in recent weeks in settling on a new treaty calling for cutbacks in [the nuclear] arsenals on both sides." The 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty expires at the end of the year. It limited the US and Russia to 6,000 nuclear warheads each.

Jim Dawson

Obama has clearly indicated that energy and the environment will form a major part of his first term by appointing Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu to the Department of Energy and Carol Browner, who led the Environmental Protection Agency under President Clinton, as a White House "czar" to try to balance the demands between the various stakeholders, industry, and the environmentalists. Now the final piece of the jigsaw, the role of science, will be put in place with the expected announcement on Saturday of John P. Holdren as science adviser.

"Holdren's experience, depth of knowledge, and intellectual rigor make him uniquely qualified to lead the development and implementation of policies to address these issues," says Fred Dylla, executive director of the American Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics Today magazine.

Last year, in a speech about energy and the environment at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Holdren said, "After 35 years of reflection on this predicament I have concluded that the environment is at the heart of the energy problem, that energy is at the heart of the environmental problem, and the intersection of the environment, the economy, and energy is the most vexing problem in the sustainable prosperity picture for developing and industrial countries alike."

When a wide-range of scientists were asked by the Obama campaign to recommend candidates for the position, Holdren's name was frequently mentioned to the transition team. In early September there were five candidates who were being considered by the campaign say sources, before being whittled down to two by mid-November. Science magazine said today that Holdren had flown to Chicago earlier this morning to meet with the president-elect, who will describe the appointment in his weekly video address on Saturday.

Andrew C. Revkin reports at the New York Times that his information is that Obama met with Holdren about 10 days ago for about an hour. Holdren, like all previous candidates to cabinet appointments, declined to discuss the situation with Revkin when contacted by telephone.

Holdren, a physicist, worked as a consultant on re-entry vehicles in the 1960s at Lockheed Martin before receiving a PhD in plasma physics at Stanford University in 1970. For three years he worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. During the 1960s, Holdren became interested in the boundaries between science and government policies regarding nuclear weapons and became involved in Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. Holdren's involvement with Pugwash helped him develop an interest in energy issues, which, after moving to the University of California, Berkeley in 1973, led him to co-found and co-lead a campus-wide interdisciplinary graduate degree program in energy and resources at the University of California, Berkeley. In the 1980s Holdren was extremely active on the Pugwash Council, the governing board of the organization, which is why he was invited to speak in Norway at the acceptance by Pugwash of the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize.

In 1996 he moved to Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and eventually became the director of the Woods Hole Research Center. In recent years he has been president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and currently serves as its board chairman.

Holdren is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has authored some 300 articles and papers. He has co-authored and co-edited some 20 books and book-length reports, such as Energy (1971), Human Ecology(1973), Ecoscience (1977), Energy in Transition (1980), Earth and the Human Future (1986), Strategic Defences and the Future of the Arms Race (1987), Building Global Security Through Cooperation (1990), Conversion of Military R&D (1998), and Ending the Energy Stalemate (2004).

Says Dylla, "His solid research as a physicist speaks to his scientific credentials, but his extensive and highly-respected work on energy technology and policy, global environmental change, and nuclear arms control and nonproliferation attest to a remarkable man who believes that science and technology must play a crucial role in improving global economic and sociopolitical conditions in both developed and developing countries."

Paul Guinnessy

For more than a year PHYSICS TODAY tracked the candidates' positions and statements related to a broad range of science issues. For those of you who were undecided over which candidate would have been best for the scientific community, we present to you direct responses from the candidates on their positions as covered by our team of editors:

Science issues are prominent in this year's presidential race

Q: Where do you stand on science education?

Q: Where do you stand on climate change?