ScienceInsider

by Erik Stokstad

For years, Asian carp have been slowly moving up the Mississippi River. In addition to competing with native fish, they jump out of the water when startled—sometimes even posing a hazard to boaters.

Now, with the invasive fish nearing Chicago, the Obama Administration has announced a new strategy for preventing the carp from entering the Great Lakes, where they could threaten a sportfishing industry worth $7 billion. The plan also includes money for research on how to battle the fish. However, the move appears unlikely to end a feud between midwestern states over what to do about the carp.

by Eli Kintisch

Officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as long as 4 years ago, hoped that NOAA would be the home of what they were calling Climate Services. Today, with the launch of a new Web site called climate.gov, NOAA's Climate Services has debuted, albeit modestly.

Congressional fans of the idea have proposed that Climate Services grow to be a $300 million clearinghouse for climate prediction tools, adaptation services, and analytical data streams to equal the National Weather Service—with an equally diverse set of customers in business and government who want to know what the changing climate will mean for them.

For now the Obama Administration has aimed low, with a flashy but easy-to-use Web site that brings together some of NOAA's climate information but acknowledges that there is much government climate data yet to be synthesized and made easy to understand. And its proposed funding for this year is also modest: $1.5 million, for the Web site.

by Gretchen Vogel

German researchers are moving their field tests of genetically modified peas to North Dakota. University of Hannover plant geneticist Hans-Jörg Jacobsen says that Germany's unclear regulations regarding field trials of GM plants and the continuing threat of vandalism prompted the move.

And when asked about the application of the socalled precautionary principle to GM plants, Jacobsen offered this rather political response:

The precautionary principle as such is questionable. If I were to agree with the precautionary principle as a central concept, I would also have to accept George W. Bush's war against Iraq, which in my view is unjustified. I am no more able to do this than to consider this principle important in the case of GM plants. Even Bush, that total loser, needed no evidence of weapons of mass destruction before launching an attack; mere suspicion was enough for him, as it is for many ideologists in this country. English makes a distinction between the "precautionary principle" and the "precautionary approach". German sticklers for principles probably can’t make this distinction. Perhaps that explains why there is no neat translation of the term "precautionary approach" in German.

by Dennis Normile

In what may presage an intellectual property battle, Rudolf Jaenisch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and Konrad Hochedlinger of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston will be awarded a patent on a technique for turning adult mammalian cells into stem cells that can in principle become any kind of cell in the body. The approach—reprogramming somatic cells—promises to be a boon for regenerative medicine. But other groups have similar patent claims pending, and some researchers worry that a tangle of patents could delay medical applications.

The pending award of the patent was announced on 4 February by Fate Therapeutics, a San Diego-based company that Jaenisch and others founded in 2007. The November 2003 application describes a possible approach to somatic cell reprogramming. "With its early priority dates and territory reach, the Jaenisch portfolio is formidable," Paul Grayson, president of Fate Therapeutics, said in a press release. Fate "is counting on this patent to raise funding, so they will be relentless" in pushing their claims, says stem cell researcher Jeanne Loring of the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego. "It's the nature of the biotech business."

by Jocelyn Kaiser

Is National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins planning to steer his ocean liner of an institute toward "big biology" at the expense of single-investigator grants? That was the fear of some in the biomedical science community on Monday when Collins discussed President Obama's budget request for a 3.2% raise, to $32 billion, for NIH in 2011. But other NIH watchers say that a close look at the budget proposal suggests that Collins's words are just spin.

Since his first day on the job last August, Collins has repeatedly emphasized his five "themes" for NIH: high-throughput technologies, translational science, health care reform, global health, and reinvigorating biomedical research. This week, Collins put his money where his mouth is. The portfolio of each NIH institute has been "mapped against the five themes," he said, with bigger increases for the priority areas.

by Pallava Bagla

Speaking at a development summit, India Prime Minister Manmohan Singh came out in full support of the beleaguered IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri, the first time Singh had addressed the issue after IPCC offered its "regret" on the blunder it committed in predicting that glaciers in the Himalayas would melt away by 2035. The Indian prime minister, who is an economist, said: "Some aspects of the science that is reflected in the work of the IPCC have faced criticism. But this debate does not challenge the core projections of the IPCC about the impact of greenhouse gas accumulations on temperature, rainfall, and sea-level rise. Let me here assert that India has full confidence in the IPCC process and its leadership and will support it in every way that it can."

by Jeffrey Mervis

Although his request for the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) represents only $300 million in a departmental budget of $28.4 billion, Energy Secretary Steven Chu clearly believes that the fledgling agency is his scientific ace in the hole. The proposed funding for ARPA-E was unveiled this week as part of the president's 2011 budget request for the Department of Energy (DOE). It would be the agency's first regular appropriation (although it received $400 million last year in the massive federal stimulus package). And the fact that the request is $75 million larger than the increase Chu is seeking for DOE's $5 billion Office of Science speaks volumes about his confidence in an agency that he championed in an influential 2005 National Academies report on strengthening U.S. science.

Speaking with reporters today after testifying on the DOE budget before the Energy and Natural Resources Committee of the U.S. Senate, Chu said he's convinced that an agency whose director has been on board for only a few months and whose staff could fit around a dining room table will accomplish great things. Here's what he had to say in response to a question from ScienceInsider:

Hit by the poor economy and lower funding from the government, King’s College London is considering “draconian” cuts of more than 200 jobs and may abandon teaching engineering, even though in 1838 it was the first in the world to open an engineering school.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Nobel Prize– winning physicist Steven Weinberg lauds NASA's focus on unmanned flight and its decision to scrap a moon mission.

The House of Representatives has held the second of three hearings on geoengineering; a report is expected this summer.

A coalition of MIT scientists and others analyzing the potential of world proposals to cut greenhouse gasses has determined that in the month since the Copenhagen Accord has passed, the world has "not closed the gap" between proposed actions and the actions that would limit anthropogenic warming to 2°C.

(Widget courtesy C-ROADS) 

by Jeffrey Mervis

The last major science holdover in the Obama Administration is stepping down this spring, leaving the president free to appoint a new director for the $7-billion National Science Foundation.

Arden Bement announced today that he will be leaving NSF on 1 June to lead a new public policy institute at Purdue University. A nuclear engineer, he's been on leave from Purdue since coming to Washington in 2001 to head the National Institutes of Standards and Technology. In 2004 President George W. Bush named him acting NSF director following the resignation of Rita Colwell and, several months later, to a full, 6-year term.

His performance since then at NSF gave the incoming Democratic Administration little reason to replace him. But his decision to step down 6 months before his term expires will ignite speculation about the next head of an agency that has traditionally enjoyed bipartisan support.

by Lauren Schenkman

Yale University plans to shrink its incoming class of graduate students by up to 15% as part of an effort to save $50 million in the upcoming academic year. The cost-cutting is a response to a $150-million deficit created by a 29% plunge in its endowment during the recession. Additional steps, announced yesterday by President Richard Levin in a letter to faculty and staff members, include freezing some faculty salaries, "consolidating" services like human resources and information technology, and adjusting thermostats to 68°F in the winter and 75°F in the summer.

Levin said that Yale will boost stipend support by 2% for students in their first few semesters. Research grants pick up the tab after that, explains Steve Girvin, deputy provost for science and technology at Yale and a professor of physics and applied physics.