ScienceInsider

NEW DELHI—India’s maiden moon mission, Chandrayaan-1, has come to a shuddering and unexpected halt. On 29 August, the Indian Space Research Organization lost all contact with the spacecraft after a catastrophic failure of its electronics, said ISRO Chair G. Madhavan Nair.

The wildfire raging in Angeles National Forrest outside of Los Angeles, California, is inching close to Mount Wilson, home to the 105-year-old Mount Wilson Observatory. The facility was evacuated on Saturday. The fire has already destroyed more than 42,000 acres of forest and claimed the lives of two firefighters. Now it threatens to destroy telescopes and other scientific equipment worth millions of dollars. Firefighters say they are bracing for a tough battle today.

—Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

The U.S. Coast Guard announced a proposed regulation today designed to prevent invasive species from entering U.S. waters. The rule would require ships to treat ballast water, which is pumped into tanks when leaving port and typically dumped at the incoming port, to kill microorganisms and larvae that come along for the ride. The Coast Guard says it "will work to elevate the priority" of research to figure out how effective the measure will be.

Geron Corp. has revealed why the Food and Drug Administration halted its much-heralded Phase I clinical trial using embryonic stem cells to treat spinal cord injury 2 weeks ago. The reason: "non-proliferative cysts." In a statement issued yesterday, the company explained that in their ongoing animal studies, a small number of those injected with the stem cell preparation had developed tiny cysts at the injury site.

But not to worry, says Geron. That's actually good news. Spinal cord patients routinely develop much larger cysts. More significantly, there is no sign that the stem cell treatment causes tumors in the animals. And animal tests with a new batch of GRNOPC1, the stem cell preparation, showed no cysts. Geron officials expressed confidence that the trial will soon be back on track.

—Constance Holden

TOKYO—The Ministry of Education's budget request for the next fiscal year has some welcome news for research, including a new teaching assistant program to employ graduate students, dramatically expanded funding for the space program, and a big increase in support for grants to researchers. But there’s a catch: In recent years the ministry, which funds the bulk of Japan's public research, has been encouraged to aim high, only to have its requests cut down by science advisory bodies, politicians, and the parsimonious Ministry of Finance.

A controversial U.S. research project on Gulf War illness got word yesterday that the government plans to end its support because of managers’ “persistent noncompliance and numerous performance deficiencies.” The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announced a decision to opt out of the study in a press release yesterday.

The study’s principal investigator is epidemiologist Robert Haley at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. Haley declined comment, referring questions to the UT Southwestern press office. Yesterday UT officials released a statement saying that they “were surprised to learn” of the government’s action. The brief statement says that UT officials “regret the VA’s unilateral decision not to renew the contract,” adding that “we strongly disagree with the VA’s characterization of the facts.”

The National Science Foundation is about as likely to become a leader in innovation, says inventor and entrepreneur Dean Kamen, as a sumo wrestler is of fitting into a tutu. Speaking this morning to a distinguished group of scientists and educators, Kamen delivered a blunt message: Don't try to do innovation yourself. Instead, give little guys like me the resources to get the job done, and then get out of the way.

Under intense pressure to save money, the University of California (UC) announced last month that all faculty and staff members who receive even a fraction of their salaries from state funds will be furloughed. But any researchers hoping to minimize the impact on their lab work by taking furlough days on teaching days appear to be out of luck.

NEW DELHI—Indian scientists point to a search for water ice above the moon's north pole, conducted with the United States on 20 August, as a sign that India's lunar craft Chandrayaan-1 is functioning well.

India's first lunar satellite had trouble earlier this year with a fine guidance mechanism. But last week Chandrayaan-1 and the U.S. Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, both now orbiting the moon, were brought within 30 kilometers of each other. Then they synchronously beamed their radars at the Erlanger crater, which is permanently shaded from sunlight, to look for evidence of water.

It was "a unique and complex experiment performed with precision," says G. Madhavan Nair, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization in Bangalore. Paul Spudis of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, principal investigator for radar instruments on both spacecraft, says "we will soon have an abundance of data." Finding water is the key for future colonization of the moon.

—Pallava Bagla

Image Credit: ISRO/NASA/JHUAPL/LPI

The virus causing the swine flu pandemic has spread to turkeys in Chile, slowed its spread in people in the Southern Hemisphere and in the United Kingdom, and is thriving in human populations in Alaska, Maine, and Japan. Drug companies are having difficulty growing the influenza A (H1N1) 2009 virus, which means that a vaccine against the disease will be in short supply this fall. So the novel H1N1 virus is behaving just as unpredictably as scientists predicted it would, said U.S. health officials at a press briefing today. “The behavior of this virus is still uncertain,” said Jesse Goodman, deputy commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, repeating what has become this pandemic’s mantra.