ScienceInsider

Tara O'Toole has been confirmed by the Senate to be undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology directorate. Patrick Gallagher has been confirmed as the director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

A cheerful welcome to ScienceInsider's new competitor: a blog published by the American Physical Society called Physics Frontline. In the new media world, sources are rivals.

The Environmental Protection Agency has teamed with NASCAR star Jeff Gordon to help body shops reduce air pollution from automotive spray paint.

For every tweet labeled #HelpHoneyBees, Häagen-Dazs will donate $1 for honey bee research at the University of California, Davis, up to $3500.

by Richard Kerr and Jeff Mervis

It was certainly striking in the telling. But the truth is another story.

Speaking to business leaders at a White House event last week on clean energy and the economy, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu was asked what he’s doing to improve energy efficiency at Department of Energy laboratories. Chu launched into a story of gross energy negligence at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), which he headed before coming to Washington, D.C.

by Greg Miller

In the new movie The Men Who Stare at Goats, which opens today in the United States, George Clooney plays a former member of a secret sect of soldiers trained by the U.S. military to deploy a host of paranormal weapons against the enemy. Their deadly talents supposedly include the ability to kill a goat via psychokinesis—by staring at the beast they can make its heart stop with thought alone.

The movie takes some liberties in the name of comedy, but the program it's based on is real. During the Cold War, the U.S. military became convinced it was losing the "mind race" against the Soviet Union, and as recently as the late 1980s was investigating a range of paranormal phenomenon and their potential uses in espionage and combat, says Jonathan Moreno, a philosopher at the University of Pennsylvania who studies military applications of cognitive science.

For more details, Moreno referred me to a 1988 National Research Council report on enhancing human performance. According to the report, some military decision makers believed that extrasensory perception ("if real and controllable") could prove valuable for intelligence gathering, while psychokinesis could find an even wider range of uses, from jamming enemy computers or weapons, planting thoughts in individuals without their knowledge, or even killing enemies at a distance. And that's not all.

by Eli Kintisch

Scientists and policy experts will meet in March next year for a 5 day meeting to hash out rules for conducting field experiments on the controversial topic of geoengineering, ScienceInsider has learned. Styled after the landmark 1975 Asilomar conference on recombinant DNA, the conference has drawn support from top climate scientists and environmental groups. But it also faces questions and criticism about its openness and the backgrounds of some of the organizers.

Yesterday’s hearing by the House of Representatives Science and Technology Committee—the first by Congress on the topic—underscores the accelerating interest in geoengineering, the deliberate tinkering with the environment to reverse global warming. The March meeting aims to be a forum for “scientists with expertise in climate engineering together with experts on risk management, governance, and ethics," said marine biologist Margaret Leinen, president of the Climate Response Fund, a new nonprofit set up to support geoengineering research. The Response Fund has partnered with Nobel Prize-winning biologist Paul Berg, who organized the 1975 event at the Asilomar conference center grounds in northern California, where the March event will also be held.

Many scientists believe that small or medium scale field trials may be needed to understand the risks of large-scale geoengineering projects. "There's a very legitimate concern about whether there would be risks associated with the research itself," said Leinen. Starting on 22 March, she hopes to convene 150 experts to examine the risks of a variety of different geoengineering methods, ranging from growing algae blooms at sea to sucking carbon dioxide or dimming the sun with particles sprayed into the upper atmosphere.

by Jeffrey Mervis

Senator Tom Coburn (R–OK) finally got his long-awaited roll-call vote last night to strip out political science research from the 2010 budget of the National Science Foundation. And while his amendment was soundly defeated, 36 to 62, it wasn't strictly a party-line vote. Five moderate Democrats—Senators Max Baucus of Montana, Evan Bayh of Indiana, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, and Jim Webb of Virginia—apparently agree with Coburn's argument that NSF, with a budget of $6.9 billion, is "wasting" federal dollars by spending $9 million a year to support research in the field.

"I have no way to explain it," says Michael Brintnall, executive director of the American Political Science Association, which has been following the issue closely. "We'd never heard that they had any concerns about funding this type of research."

The amendment came as the Senate cleared a $65-billion spending bill that funds multiple agencies, including NSF, NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The next step is to resolve differences between its version and the one passed this summer by the House of Representatives. Congress has completed work on only four of 12 spending bills for the fiscal year that began on 1 October. The rest of the government is covered by a continuing resolution, holding spending at 2009 levels, that expires on 18 December.

As much as a quarter of U.S. farmers growing genetically modified corn are not following rules meant to ensure that insects do not develop resistance to an organic pesticide called Bt.

The company Complete Genomics reports online in Science today that its scientists have sequenced three human genome sequences for $4400 apiece.

Doctors Without Borders is warning that cuts in HIV funding could undermine recent progress in treating AIDS in developing countries.

A group called LaserMotive successfully ran a climber up 1 kilometer of test cable yesterday as part of a NASA competition to build a space elevator, winning the 2nd place prize of $900,000. The first place prize has yet to be awarded.

The outrage among scientists over the firing of U.K. drug policy adviser David Nutt continues to bubble. Thursday, Martin Rees, the president of the Royal Society, offered his first thoughts on the matter, saying:

Scientific advisers are not there to rubber-stamp policies. Advice should reach ministers before decisions are taken; and when ministers want to reject it, they should discuss it first. Where government does reject scientific evidence, it must explain why openly.

And today, a quickly formed group of leading U.K. scientists, including Rees and former Royal Society President Robert May, call on their government (UKStatement.pdf) to endorse the following "Principles for the Treatment of Independent Scientific Advice":

by Eli Kintisch

At an otherwise fairly pedestrian House of Representatives hearing on geoengineering today—the first of its kind in the United States—science committee chair Representative Bart Gordon (D–TN) announced a new partnership with the U.K. House of Commons to hold joint hearings on the controversial topic next year. The effort would mark the inaugural effort to set up international rules on the topic:

Chairman Gordon announced that this hearing will be part of a partnership with the United Kingdom House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. The two Committees will hold parallel hearings and share materials once they are publicly available.

by Eli Kintisch

One wonders if it's unlikely that a comprehensive climate deal will happen in Copenhagen—as U.N. Secretary-General Ban-Ki Moon said yesterday—how much china the Democrats are willing to break as they push the Senate to act on climate in time for the meeting. Today, the Senate's climate bill cleared a major hurdle as Democrats on the Environment and Public Works Committee passed the legislation.

The Natural Resources Defense Council believes:

This clears the way for full Senate action on clean energy and climate legislation that will put Americans back to work, reduce our reliance on foreign oil and create a healthier future for our children. Americans are united around these goals. It's time for the full Senate to act.

But Senator Barbara Boxer (D–CA), the committee chair, moved the bill without any Republicans present to offer amendments, potentially further alienating a party she may need to work with over the next month to pass a bill.

by Jon Cohen

Concern appears to be rising at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about people in lower risk groups cutting in line to receive the limited supplies of H1N1 vaccine. A letter sent today from CDC Director Thomas Frieden to state and local health officers urges that the 35.6 million doses of the vaccine now available first go to people at the highest risk of developing severe disease from the pandemic virus. Although the letter does not detail any specific problems, it pointedly says, “vaccine distribution decisions that appear to direct vaccine to people outside the identified priority groups have the potential to undermine the credibility of the program.”