Findings

ESOF finished yesterday, but new funding from charitable foundations should assure its future for a while. And more people should be able to enjoy the fun if ESOF 2010 can pull off plans to webcast the entire show. Check out this week's print edition of Science for the details.

And if you want even more ESOF 2008, check out the posts on the Science Careers blog--one explores a discussion on whether women scientists can do both family and research and another notes that a free bag is not what new researchers want from ESOF.

See you in Turin in 2010.

--Science's European News Staff

The Euro is stronger than the dollar, but when it comes to making profits, Europe still has an inferiority complex about the success of the United States. That's why several sessions at ESOF targeted the question of how to better get basic research out of the lab and into the marketplace, making money for European companies. This morning, Andrew Dearing of the European Industrial Research Management Association chaired a session on "Achieving a more innovative Europe." One interesting comment from his introduction was: "We've come from a long period in which we were told we shouldn't pick winners."

Europe has always tended to spread the wealth--most of its science funding, for example, goes to so-called Framework Programmes that must involve scientists from multiple countries, even if focusing money on one group might get more accomplished. Yet that's starting to change, both for the European Union as a whole and for its member countries. France, for example, has dared to throw money at a small number of universities, hoping to make R&D powerhouses. Germany has done the same, seeking "elite" universities. In both cases, the schools not selected were none too pleased. The E.U. now has its own way of picking science's top echelon: the European Research Council, which picks the best grant proposals from researchers no matter their location, and those scientists can go work anywhere in the E.U. Yet the ERC's budget remains only about 15% of all E.U. science funding.

Some of the discussion at the session noted a July 15 letter in the Financial Times by Esko Aho, Finland's former prime minister and now president of the Finnish innovation fund Sitra, and Frank Brown, dean of the Insead business school (Aho also led a group that produced a 2006 report on "Creating An Innovative Europe"). The European Commission will soon issue a policy statement on how to create a European "Silicon Valley" and the letter urges the Commission to be brave and only pick a few existing science "clusters" to get new money instead of continuing the strategy of making everyone happy by adding more centers. Aho and Brown write:

Yesterday I attended the provocatively titled session "Mars and Venus:  How Europeans and Americans view and use science." The American  speaker was Alan Leshner, CEO of AAAS (publisher of Science) (far right in photo).  Representing Europe was Roland Schenkel (far left), Director General of the Joint Research Center (JRC) in Brussels, and the JRC's press officer, Aidan  Gilligan Patrick Cunningham, the Chief Scientific Adviser to the Irish Government, who chaired the session. When I bumped into Leshner the previous night at  a party, I asked him whether the US is Mars or Venus. "Funny, everyone keeps asking me that," he said. But he neither chose the session's  title nor knew the answer. In what might be an ESOF first, the  speakers started by changing the title of their own session. "Serena  and Venus is a better analogy," said Leshner, referring to the  professional tennis-star Williams sisters. "It's a competition, but we're in the same boat."

"Science has flourished for the past 400 years in Europe," said Schenkel, "but today the U.S. dominates." Why? The reason is the nature  of the two beasts, he says. "The U.S. is a single massive economy,"  while the European Union (E.U.)--though collectively the larger economy-- is composed of many countries pursuing their own interests. To put  that into perspective, said Schenkel, "imagine a U.S.A in which the  federal government managed only 5% of overall R&D expenditure with  95% managed individually by 50 independent states." On an optimistic  note, he pointed out that the E.U.'s share of the world's peer-reviewed  scientific articles is 38% to the U.S.'s 33%. But a scientist in the  audience pointed out that the E.U. papers have a much lower total impact  factor. "The reason is that we speak 15 languages," he said before  proposing that all publicly-funded E.U. scientists be forced to publish their research in English. (Schenkel shot that idea down as unworkable.)

Leshner focused on the increasing tension between science and society  in the U.S., arguing that the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks have "skewed" research priorities. The budgets for research on "biosecurity" have ballooned, he said, while many of those for basic  research stagnated. But the biggest flies in the ointment between science and society, according to Leshner are "current scientific issues that abut against core values:  embryonic stem cell research, studies of sex, genetics of behavior, neuroscience (challenging concepts of mind/body), and the teaching of intelligent design versus evolution in science classrooms." Leshner also shared some optimism.  "Both Obama and McCain seem to be science friendly," he said. Then again, "we are facing the largest fiscal deficit in the history of the U.S." Europe's economy is facing tough times too. The science "boat" for each powerhouse region may soon encounter rough waters.

--John Bohannon

With thousands of outstanding examples of ancient architecture, artifacts, and landscapes sprinkled all around the continent, “Europe has good reasons to celebrate its cultural heritage,” Cristina Sabbioni, a researcher at the Italian National Research Council’s Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate in Bologna, told ESOF attendees yesterday. Europe’s rich cultural heritage is at the heart of both the local tourism industry and European identity, she added.

Prompted by its impressive cultural history, Europe has pioneered many aspects of conservation science, but Sabbioni is worried about losing the edge. “Europe has a long experience in cultural heritage scientific research and has the world leadership in this sector. But to maintain this competitiveness… coordination is needed at European level,” Sabbioni said.

ESOF still has two days to go, but one of yesterday's sessions was already looking ahead to the next edition, in 2010 in Turin, Italy. Among the new features: an ambitious plan to Webcast the meeting in its entirety. As reflected in the periodic table-inspired portion of its logo, the appropriately Italian theme of the 2010 conference is "Passion for Science." Turin beat out Paris, Copenhagen, and Wroclaw in an Olympic-style bidding process to host ESOF. The city won the bid with help from the Compagnia Sao Paolo, a big Turin-based private foundation that has also promised to be a major sponsor for the event. The size of its contribution remains to be determined, however, as do those from local and regional governments and businesses that ESOF is hitting up for money. Indeed, covering the 4 to 5 million Euro provisional budget "is our main concern right now," says physicist Enrico Predazzi, president of the ESOF 2010 management board.

As noted in an earlier post, I caught a glimpse of an ESOF speaker preparing his talk on the plane flight to Barcelona. His name is Gary Morgan of City University London and the few slides I saw him preparing on his computer suggested he was going to challenge claims that "Baby Signing" classes could help an infant's brain develop faster. I didn't know what baby signing was, but it sounded provocative so I, and a surprisingly large number of people, showed up 8:30 a.m. Saturday to hear Morgan, co-director of University College London's Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre, speak.

"Does anyone here do baby signing classes?" he started off. One person raised their hand.

"Does anyone here work for the baby signing industry or promote baby signing classes?" Morgan next asked. No one responded. "Good, so I can say what I want to."

Hmm, any talk that starts that way has to be good. And it was.

Whenever primate researcher Josep Call goes on a trip, he packs his bag the night before and puts his passport and tickets in its front pocket. The next morning, he checks to make sure they are still there. He fully remembers putting them in the bag, but he looks anyway. We humans are fallible, after all, and we know it--thus we often feel uncertain even when we have little reason to.

Over the past several years Call and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have been studying nonhuman apes such as chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, and gorillas to see how much they realize that they are uncertain too--a key component to the kind of self awareness we call consciousness. The experiments take several forms, including placing apes in front of two hollow tubes that they can look through. A human experimenter then places a grape in the back of one of the two tubes, either in the full view of the ape or out of his sight. All the ape has to do to get the food is to touch the right tube.

Protein degradation is a gripping tale--verging on melodrama--in the hands of Aaron Ciechanover. "Every protein has its story," says the 2004 Nobelist in chemistry from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. His plenary talk yesterday began with a quick tour of the rollercoaster ride his field has taken in recent decades, from prominence to obscurity and back. Biology's fascination with the double helix and all that it brought seemed to shunt everything else aside for a time. Ciechanover's main theme was the enduring importance of ubiquitin, the molecule that he says delivers the universal "kiss of death" to molecules within the body. Proteins embraced by it are doomed to destruction. Without it, deadly errors accumulate.

The hottest power snack of ESOF08 was certainly the Tokamak doughnut. Modeled closely on the toroidal reactor vessel, or tokamak, of a nuclear fusion reactor, and engineered by Fusion for Energy, the organization procuring the European components of the global ITER fusion reactor project, the doughnuts were baked at a slightly lower temperature than the 100 million degrees typical inside the real thing. The limited edition snacks were disappearing fast from the Fusion for Energy stall this morning, perhaps because of concern among delegates that, with the US budget for ITER axed in fiscal year 08, they may not get another chance soon.

--Daniel Clery

"The most revolutionary picture of the 20th century"

It's not a shot of a group of soldiers raising a flag on Iwo Jima, not even Marilyn Monroe standing over an air vent in a white dress. CERN theoretical physicist Alvaro De Rujula thinks the title should go to this blurry picture of the Sun. Why? Because it shows the Sun´s core, which is usually invisible to us, and because it was taken not with light but with neutrinos, ghostly particles that rarely interact with matter.

Light usually takes thousands of years to work its way from the core to the Sun´s surface before making the 8 minute journey to Earth. Neutrinos, on the other hand, zip straight out from the Sun´s heart but their disinclination to interact with matter also makes them extremely hard to detect. The camera used for this picture was a vast tank containing 50,000 tons of water 1 kilometer underground in a mine in Japan. The Super-Kamiokande detector took the picture in the mid 1990s with an exposure lasting 500 days. So, as well as being the last century's most remarkable picture, it may also have been among the most expensive to produce.

--Daniel Clery