ScienceInsider

The new idea of a scaled-back climate bill to focus just on the power sector is a bad idea, said White House climate czar Carol Browner.

A historic two-story building at Los Alamos National Laboratory that was part of the Manhattan Project will be demolished on Tuesday.

Astronauts on space shuttle Atlantis have had their sleep disrupted by false alarms as they orbit Earth. The Space Exploration Alliance, meanwhile, has announced a lobbying blitz in February.

The Ocean, Coastal, and Watershed Education Act, which authorizes NOAA to expand its education programs, has passed committee and is moving on to the House floor, though no date is set for a vote.

by Eli Kintisch

Hackers who breached East Anglia's Climate Research Unit servers have provided explosive new fuel in the climate data wars. The data exposed in hundreds of megabytes stolen from the research center include more than a thousand e-mails among climate scientists, many of them prominent, and dozens of files. The information has inspired a feeding frenzy among bloggers who oppose the standard line on climate change.

Top scientists who are quoted include Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, University Park, and Kevin Trenberth and Tom Wigley of NCAR. The discussions in them—likely released with timing aimed to undermine the process in Copenhagen—include debates over the inadequacy of scientific reviews, efforts to interpret climate data, and discussions on deleting e-mails after receiving Freedom of Information Act requests that could conceivably get some of the scientists in trouble.

RealClimate's take is here. 

by Eli Kintisch

The $150 million Clean Energy Research Center that the two superpowers agreed to fund this week represents no less than a revolution in the way the two countries think about joint research. There's plenty of warranted skepticism about whether the two countries, which together emit 40% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, will ever agree to actual cuts. But on energy research, Presidents Barack Obama and Hu Jintao are entering new territory—and in some important ways, as it ramps up its energy research enterprise, China could lead the way.

The center, a virtual collaboration in which each country manages its own projects, is supposed to receive $15 million a year for 5 years from each country. By comparison, the U.S. Department of Energy now spends roughly $5.5 million on joint energy research with China. (The National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, for instance, spends only $500,000 per year on joint research with China.)

American scientists have shared their scientific and technological expertise with China for decades, but until now Chinese scientists have contributed only in-kind donations, mostly salaries, to joint energy studies. Now they'll be equal financial partners in the venture.

"That's intriguing," said NREL's David Kline. "Extremely significant" was how Mark Levine of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California put it. DOE's David Sandalow said the new partnership "reflects the strong Chinese interest in energy."

by Martin Enserink

PARIS—France's collective brainpower may be headed for a massive boost in the government's long-awaited economic stimulus plan. A panel chaired by two former prime ministers recommends spending more than €20 billion on boosting research, higher education, innovation, and technology. The plan would also give the 5-year-old National Research Agency (ANR), whose €800 million budget has been flat for several years, considerably more clout.

After months of study and testimony by more than 200 witnesses, the panel, chaired by former French prime ministers Alain Juppé and Michel Rocard, presented its report to French President Nicolas Sarkozy yesterday. In total, it recommends a €35 billion "investment in the future," €22 billion of which is to be borrowed on the financial markets—which is why the plan is also known as the Big Loan.

Noting that France is lagging in international rankings of scientific output and fails to turn science into business, the group says that investing in knowledge should be the top priority. The panel’s spending proposals include:

By Adrian Cho

For the first time in more than a year, protons should soon be whizzing around the world’s biggest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), officials at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, have announced. Within the next several hours, physicists at the lab near Geneva, Switzerland, aim to have beams of particle making complete laps through the 27-kilometer-long ring-shaped accelerator. That would get them back to where they were on 19 September 2008, when the LHC suffered a catastrophic failure just 9 days after researchers first fed particles all the way around it. “Keep your fingers crossed for us,” says Steve Myers, CERN’s director of accelerators and technology.

After researchers achieve stable circulating beams, they will likely try to accelerate them to an unprecedented energy of 1.2 tera-electron volts—only 1/6 of the LHC’s design energy of 7 TeV per beam. “The dream scenario is that people come to work Monday morning and find that we’ve broken the world record for energy,” says CERN spokesperson James Gillies.

by Dennis Normile

TOKYO—Nothing rouses a research community like a threat to its funding, as could be seen this week here in Japan after a task force recommended deep cuts (subs req) in the Ministry of Education's budget for fiscal year 2010. Grass-roots efforts have sprung up to defend individual projects, while community leaders are asserting the importance of research to Japan's future.

The Government Revitalization Unit was set up by the newly elected Democratic Party to identify wasteful spending in the budget requests for the year beginning next April so that money can be steered toward social programs. Three working groups are in the midst of a 9-day review, with just an hour or so allowed for discussion of each line item. One of the three working groups reviewed 40 projects and spending categories in the education ministry's budget during hearings on 13 and 17 November. Few were spared. Based on just a partial list of the projects carried in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, the task force recommended cuts running up to $3 billion, equivalent to more than 10% of the education ministry's research-related spending this year.

But backers of targeted projects are fighting back.

Paul Alivisatos has been named director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

Experts told a congressional panel today that the United States is losing its lead in spaceflight.

The Senate Energy Committee will explore the economics of the climate bill next Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the Navy prepares for global warming by envisioning an ice-free Arctic.

Did a classification error doom a fish called a slapper skate to near extinction?

Students at the University of California, Los Angeles protested ahead of a vote in which the Regents approved fee hikes.

Americans polled say they believe a cure for cancer will be found and aliens discovered before peace in the Middle East is reached.

by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

Advances in synthetic biology have prompted fears that terrorists might develop biological weapons by purchasing made-to-order DNA sequences from gene synthesis companies and using them to engineer deadly pathogens. Five of the world's leading gene synthesis companies today announced steps they are already implementing—or plan to implement—a plan to prevent misuse of the technology. The announcement comes amid calls for tougher government controls on the field of synthetic genomics.

The companies, which make up what they call the International Gene Synthesis Consortium, already examine purchase orders to ensure that they are not supplying customers with genomes of pathogens that many governments consider as potential threats to biosecurity. The consortium's members now plan to strengthen this procedure by screening orders against a database they say will be more comprehensive.

by Constance Holden

Social and behavioral research is finally getting some of the high-level attention it has sought for years at the National Institutes of Health. Yesterday NIH Director Francis Collins announced that $10 million in recovery money will go to support the launch of the Basic Behavioral and Social Science Opportunity Network – they're calling it OppNet, an initiative to support and coordinate basic behavioral research throughout NIH.

The American Psychological Society  Association for Psychological Science (APS), which has been working with Congress for about a decade to get more behavioral science into NIH, is ecstatic about OppNet. APS Executive Director Alan Kraut says NIH's Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, which isn't a funding agency, "has had less and less impact over time." OppNet, to be led by Jeremy Berg, director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, and National Institute on Aging Director Richard Hodes, "is much higher visibility." It will be getting all institute directors together on a regular basis to talk about behavioral research needs. Although basic behavioral research already gets about $1 billion a year from NIH, Kraut says OppNet will funnel money into cross-disciplinary areas that have hitherto been ignored. NIH institutes and centers have committed to putting another $110 million into the initiative over the next 5 years.