ScienceInsider

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 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.

by Eli Kintisch

On 18 December, the last day of the Copenhagen climate meeting, what will President Barack Obama tell the world that the United States is prepared to do?

With a month to go, that's the challenge. We already know Copenhagen won't have legally binding agreements, but how the nations of the world use the meeting to tee up negotiations in 2010 will determine whether the event will be deemed a barely marginal success or a total repudiation of the U.N. approach.

Today Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao raised the stakes in a Joint Agreement they signed. And they put a big onus on the U.S. Senate to come up with numbers for its emissions cuts goals. Hu and Obama said in their statement that "an agreed outcome in Copenhagen" should:

include emission reduction targets of developed countries and nationally appropriate mitigation actions of developing countries.

The word "targets" on 18 December would mean actual commitments to emissions cuts. Getting them would be a pretty good accomplishment for the meeting, especially with organizers lowering expectations by the day. The hope was that the U.S. Senate would have passed its version of the climate bill by then, so Obama's negotiators could have real legislated targets to bring to the table in December.

That's not going to happen. The next best thing is Obama's challenge: coming up with a number from Congress with some credibility, with a month to go. Here's how it might go down.

by Dennis Normile

TOKYO—Manned space exploration "is in our DNA," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said during a town hall meeting here today at the University of Tokyo (Todai). The former astronaut said he hoped to convince his boss, U.S. President Barack Obama, that manned space flight "is as important as I think it is." Given the costs, he noted, manned space exploration will require the kind of international cooperation on display at the meeting, where he was joined by Keiji Tachikawa, president of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and former astronaut Chiaki Mukai, a veteran of three space shuttle missions.

The space agency heads did not announce any new initiatives. But both emphasized the importance of joint efforts in earth observation, space science, and extending the life of the International Space Station. Last summer, a U.S. government panel recommended operating the space station through 2020. Bolden doesn’t view that as an expiration date: "I'm willing to fly ISS as long as it is productive," he said.

by Dennis Normile

Not surprisingly, cancer researchers in Asia think their specialty deserves to be a higher global health priority. Today at an Asia Cancer Forum discussion in Tsukuba, Japan, one speaker after another pointed to statistics showing that cancer, though thought of as an advanced country scourge, is rapidly overtaking AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria as a cause of premature mortality in the developing world. Yet cancer isn’t mentioned as one of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Shigeru Omi, former World Health Organization Regional Director for the Western Pacific now at Jichi Medical University in Tochigi Prefecture, drew murmurs of approval from the partisan crowd when he said the global health pendulum had swung too far towards addressing infectious diseases "at the expense of non-communicable diseases." He suggested that Japan use its influence with international organizations to rebalance priorities.

by Michael Balter

Last week, attorneys for biologist and author Jared Diamond and Advance Publication Inc., publisher of The New Yorker, filed papers in New York state court in response to a lawsuit filed against them last April by two tribesmen from Papua New Guinea. The plaintiffs, Daniel Wemp and Isum Mandingo, claimed that Diamond and The New Yorker had defamed then in an article Diamond wrote for the magazine in April 2008, entitled "Vengence is Ours," about a tribal war that allegedly took place some years earlier

On Friday the plaintiffs filed an "Amended Complaint" (pdf) in court which gives the details of their accusations. The 30-page document summarizing the charges against Diamond and The New Yorker, which allegedly "falsely accus[ed] plaintiffs of criminal behavior, including complicity in multiple murders and in the case of Wemp promoting prostitution and/or rape."

The document goes on to quote extensively from The New Yorker article, responding to each passage with a section entitled "The truth." For example, in response to Diamonds description of Daniel Wemp as the main organizer of the revenge war, the document states:

Daniel Wemp was not a participant in this war at all. At the time of the fighting, Wemp was working some 200 miles away at the coast, in a city called Madang. He only learned of the fighting after it was over.

The defendants are now demanding a total of at least $45 million in damages for the injuries they have allegedly suffered to their reputation. No trial date has been set.

Ed. Note: This story, which was removed on 19 October due to an editorial miscommunication, is being republished in its original form.

by Cheryl Jones

CANBERRA—Just days after Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco, became the first Australia-born woman to win a Nobel Prize, for work on telomeres, a report released here today has revealed that most of her female compatriots are low on Australia’s science food chain.

Women accounted for about 22% of full-time professionals in design, engineering, science, and transport in 2009—faint improvement over the roughly 18% tabulated in 1996, according to the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies, which commissioned the “Women in Science in Australia” report.

Lighting up the Internet in India are bizarre allegations that a researcher at the country's premier defense lab was attacked with an ax in a bungled attempt at human sacrifice. But in a press release today, the Defence Research and Development Establishment in Gwalior labeled the allegations "baseless" and noted that it has tasked a committee to report back on the matter by 28 October.

—Pallava Bagla

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.  

By Jon Cohen

A large clinical trial of an AIDS vaccine has, for the first time, yielded positive results. But researchers immediately questioned the relevance of the data, which indicated that the vaccine offered only modest protection against infection by HIV.

The controversial trial, conducted with more than 16,000 volunteers in Thailand over the past 6 years, tested the effectiveness of two AIDS vaccines used together as a one-two punch. Researchers randomly assigned an equal number of participants who were at average risk of becoming infected by HIV to receive either the two vaccines or a saline placebo. At the end of the study in June, 51 of the vaccinated people had become infected within 3 years of receiving their last shot, compared with 74 people in the placebo group. The p value, which indicates whether results are due to chance, was less than 0.039, just below the widely accepted but arbitrary “significance” cutoff of 0.05. Surprisingly, the vaccine did not appear to suppress levels of the virus in the 51 people who became infected. No serious adverse events were seen in either group.

Many AIDS vaccine researchers had predicted that the study would fail, and its sponsors are thrilled by the efficacy, marginal though it may be. “Although the level of protection was modest, we think the study is a major scientific advance,” said Colonel Jerome Kim, HIV vaccines product manager for the U.S. Army, which collaborated with the Thai Ministry of Health to conduct the efficacy trial. “We were all pretty energized by the results.” The U.S. military and Thai officials will announce the results of the trial, the largest ever held of an AIDS vaccine (see table on other AIDS vaccine trials after the jump), at press conferences today in Thailand and the United States.

Several longtime critics of the study, which cost $105 million, were dumbfounded—and circumspect—when they learned the results.