ScienceInsider

by Eli Kintisch

The National Academy of Science says Arecibo Observatory (left, credit NASA) could provide a "uniquely powerful" tool for finding incoming space rocks before they impact earth and destroy all life. The report could boost the troubled prospects of the telescope.

Two Senators have introduced the Senate version of the greenhouse gas limits legislation, pushing among other things for a 20% cut below U.S. 2005 levels instead of a 17% cut, what the House of Representatives proposed.

Per the Associated Press: "A neuroscientist who studied the effects of drugs on the brain is dead of an apparent overdose and her live-in boyfriend, who did similar research, is facing drug charges, Baltimore police said Tuesday." The scientists were postdocs and the University of Maryland.

The fiscal year ends today, and details should be out tomorrow on so-called "continuing resolutions" that will continue government operations until congress can finalize spending bills. Also details should be available of the final versions of the energy and water spending bill, which lawmakers finalized in House-Senate conferences today; the agriculture bill may be completed too.

Join the debate on pesticides featuring a keynote address by Senator Mike Johanns (R–NE) at the American Enterprise Institute next Tuesday.

by Jocelyn Kaiser

President Barack Obama paid a visit to the National Institutes of Health this morning to announce that the agency has given out $5 billion in stimulus money for over 12,000 grants. The bolus of money, though only half of the $10.4 billion NIH received to spend over 2 years, is "the single largest boost to biomedical research in history," Obama said.

About 500 NIH institute chiefs, employees, and dignitaries gathered in an auditorium at NIH's clinical center for the announcement, where NIH Director Francis Collins and his boss, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, took the stage. Collins praised his staff's efforts to get the stimulus money out, which he said is "not just about doubling the recipe," but includes "some of the most innovative and creative directions for research that I have ever seen in 16 years at NIH."

by Elisabeth Pain

A 2010 national budget plan (in Spanish) was given to Spain’s Parliament yesterday and funding levels for the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation are staying more or less the same as last year’s levels, despite the economic crisis.

by Gretchen Vogel

The Nobel Prizes need an overhaul, according to a panel of scientists assembled by New Scientist magazine. In an open letter to the Nobel Foundation published today, the scientists say that the prizes, scheduled to be awarded next week, don’t sufficiently reflect today’s science. Too many important areas of research are left out of the categories that Alfred Nobel specified in his 1896 will, they say. They ask the foundation to establish two new prizes, one for the Global Environment and one for Public Health advances, and for both they suggest allowing organizations to be eligible, as they are for the Peace prize.

They also want to expand eligibility for the Physiology or Medicine prize to all biologists. In an accompanying article, Jim Giles points out that plant scientists were miffed when the 2006 prize was awarded for RNA silencing. The fundamental work had been done in plants, but the award went to researchers who transferred the technique to worms—and were therefore eligible for the Physiology or Medicine prize. “Fundamental breakthroughs in areas such as neuroscience and ecology … are also going unrecognized,” the scientists write.

The chances of change are apparently slim—Giles writes that the Nobel Foundation is loathe to tinker with the prizes. For disappointed researches, there are always the IgNobel prizes, scheduled to be awarded tomorrow night in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

by John Travis

A petition aiming to stop the U.K. Border Agency's controversial Human Provenance Pilot Program has been filed with the U.K. government, according to a comment on the original ScienceInsider story. If the petition is approved for posting and there are enough online signatures, the government is obligated to file a response.

The Genomics Law Report blog discusses why the Border Agency project will "echo beyond the U.K.'s borders."

Several isotope specialists, including one from a private isotope analysis firm, have also added their opinions on the topic in comments to the original story. For example, Paul F. Dennis, head of Stable Isotope and Noble Gas Laboratories at the University of East Anglia, writes:

May I add my criticism of this to those of Jane Evans, Tamsin O'Connell and Jessica Pearson. Isotope studies of keratin based human material (nails and hair) will only give broad information relating to the recent past movements (say 1 to 2 years) of an individual and no information with respect to nationality. I know of no study, published or unpublished, that shows isotopes are useful in determining a persons place of birth or nationality.

by Jon Cohen

The push to deliver antiretroviral drugs to all HIV-infected people who need them made another step forward last year, but still has a long ways to go. As of December 2008, 4 million people in low- and middle-income countries were receiving the drugs, up from 400,000 in 2003 and 3 million in 2007, according to a progress report issued by the World Health Organization today. But the document also notes that more than 5 million HIV-infected people still have no access to the life-saving medicine.

The situation regarding antiretrovirals for pregnant women to prevent mother-to-child transmission of the virus is also a good news/bad news story. Although 45% of pregnant, HIV-infected women received them—a jump of 10% from the previous year—more than half did not, meaning many babies became infected even though a proven strategy exists to prevent that from happening. Other prevention efforts to reach men who have sex with men and injecting drug users similarly are struggling.

by Dennis Normile

As expected, Japan's new government announced yesterday it is ordering ministries to rethink the 2010 budget requests they submitted on 28 August—a process that could have an impact on science-related spending. New requests, due 15 October, are expected to reflect the policies of the Democratic Party, which won a 30 August election and took power on 16 September. The biggest changes are likely to be in expanded social services and cutbacks in public works projects. But the Democratic Party's campaign platform also called for developing renewable energy technologies and cutting greenhouse gas emissions.  

Indonesia, the third biggest single carbon dioxide emitter of the world in 2000, has pledged to cut its emissions 26% by 2020.

President Barack Obama will visit the U.S.. National Institutes of Health tomorrow to announce stimulus funding and tour the facilities.

Actress Sigourney Weaver joined Senator Frank Lautenberg (D–NJ) and officials from the Natural Resources Defense Council today at a press conference for Acid Test: The Global Challenge of Ocean Acidification.

The House of Representatives science committee will be marking up legislation on harmful algae blooms (satellite photo, courtesy NOAA, left) tomorrow at 10 a.m.

A new report urges public participation in the debate over nanotechnology.

Tomorrow Senators John Kerry (D–MA) and Barbara Boxer (D–CA) will introduce the Senate version of the Markey-Waxman greenhouse gas bill.

by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

How can safety be improved at biocontainment labs, where researchers work with dangerous pathogens and toxins? A new report from an interagency task force that has been studying the topic since 2007 recommends mandatory biosafety training for professionals working at such labs, a system of credentialing lab personnel, and oversight of biosafety procedures by a single federal entity. Currently, institutions are expected to adhere to biosafety guidelines laid down by the National Institutes of Health; the report calls for converting them into rules. (Many institutions, such at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, already require all of their biocontainment lab employees to undergo training.)

The task force also recommends a voluntary system of reporting in which institutions are encouraged to report all accidents in biocontainment labs without fear of punishment or public disclosure of identity. Under current rules, labs must report cases of human exposure to pathogens to the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, but lab managers rarely report accidents that are less serious—such as a vial leaking onto a lab bench. The report says analyzing such incidents can help provide important safety lessons that could then be applied to all labs.

by Richard A. Kerr

Just days after expressing “great confidence” that they had found the best possible target for next week’s planned crash into the moon, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission team has retreated from its first choice. Yesterday, NASA quietly posted the targeting switch from crater Cabeus A to nearby Cabeus proper.

The goal of crashing LCROSS’s spent upper stage is to kick up any subsurface water ice into the view of the trailing LCROSS spacecraft. (The mission is only distantly connected to last week's much ballyhooed finding of molecular water on the lunar surface.) But continuing analysis of remote sensing from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was pointing to stronger signs of subsurface hydrogen—presumably in the form of water—in the permanent shadow inside Cabeus than in similarly cold shadow in Cabeus A, according to the NASA statement. At the same time, topographical observations from the orbiter and the Japanese orbiter Kaguya were showing that ground-based astronomers could after all glimpse impact ejecta through a gap in the high rim of Cabeus. Impact still will be as planned at 7:30 a.m. EDT on 9 October.