ScienceInsider

by Jeffrey Mervis

Does the United States need another high-powered panel recommending ways to improve how students learn science and math?

The President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology (PCAST) thinks the answer is yes. Late last week, the presidentially appointed body heard from two expert panels and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan about what governments, academic institutions, and the private sector are doing to raise the quality of teachers, improve the curriculum, and close the achievement gap between rich and poor students. Council members pressed witnesses to explain the theory behind their efforts and provide evidence to back up any reported successes. They also solicited advice on how PCAST might make a unique contribution to the raft of existing reports and analyses.

PCAST would like to get a report to the president within 6 months, says Eric Lander, head of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who will be leading the effort along with Jim Gates, a physics professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. “We have a lot of issues on our plate, but this one is too important to ignore,” Lander said after the 2-day meeting, which ended on Friday.

What aspects of U.S. science education do you think PCAST should focus on?

by Jeffrey Mervis

The nominees to head the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the new Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) at the Department of Energy breezed through their joint Senate confirmation hearing this morning. But the 1-hour hearing gave Marcia McNutt at USGS and Arun Majumdar at ARPA-E a chance to raise the lid on some issues they are likely to tackle once each is approved—and no opposition to either nominee is expected—and sworn into office.

by Jeffrey Mervis

President Barack Obama spent time yesterday looking at the stars—both real and those in the scientific firmament.

In a formal ceremony in the East Room of the White House, the president honored this year's winners of the National Medal of Science and National Medal of Technology. A few hours later he stepped outside into the clean, crisp evening and, dressed more casually, invited some 200 middle school students to join him to look through a sea of telescopes assembled on the White House lawn.

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 Eli Kintisch

Last week, the White House nominated Arun Majumdar to lead ARPA-E, the risk-taking blue-sky energy research shop at the Department of Energy. Majumdar is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a materials scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. At the new agency, Majumdar will face a myriad of challenges: shaping the organization's priorities in a time when thousands of scientists are delving into energy research areas and clamoring for money, defining its balance between applied and basic research, and deciding just how "blue-sky" he wants DOE to be going with the new concept.

"He's a good manager—running two labs and always having time for the students," says former student Marta Cerruti, a chemist. Cerruti says Majumdar's wide knowledge "in many fields" will help him with ARPA-E's wide goals. He's shown the ability to balance short- and long-term goals in lab research, for example during a project to design a multiuse portable sensor. "He was always pushing us to look for long-term goals—namely, that it could work in moist environments, but at the same time, keeping the short-term objective," Cerruti says. That goal was to make a sensor that could work in dry ones, a much easier task.

Assuming the Senate confirms him, Majumdar will come to Washington with the best connections he could ask for: Current Energy Secretary Steve Chu was his former boss at LBNL.

By Eli Kintisch

The biggest news coming out of the one-day U.N. General Assembly summit on climate change was President Hu Jintao's announcement that China will seek to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by a “notable margin” relative to the 2005 level by 2020. Those are vague words, but it's a significant step for a number of reasons, and the news provides some clues about China's motivations heading towards December's U.N. climate treaty talks in Copenhagen. Present Barack Obama also spoke, highlighting a number of recent initiatives on climate and pledging his commitment to the issue.

Together the United States and China emit 40% of the world's greenhouse gases. But lots of questions remain on both sides of the Pacific. The House of Representatives passed a climate bill in June, but a stalled effort on health care has delayed the Senate from examining the issue. Obama remains weakened by the financial crisis and the increasingly dire picture in Afghanistan and may have less political leverage than he once had.

Three things we learned:

1. China is negotiating. China has never been represented in front of the General Assembly by its president before, so Hu’s appearance there underlines how seriously he takes the climate issue, says Jennifer Morgan of the World Resources Institute in Washington, D.C. Hu seems to understand that putting something on the table is critical to helping motivate the members of the Senate who so far have signaled deep reservations. Of course, 75 days from now in Copenhagen, behind closed doors, China will make major decisions on just how far it wants to go. But the number one emitter in the world has never mentioned a step like this before in public.

The Obama Administration announced today that it will retain Thomas D'Agostino as head of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. The decision was met with dismay by many in the arms control and non-proliferation community, who fear that it will be harder to implement the soaring vision for a nuclear-free future that President Obama has articulated while retaining key figures from a Bush Administration that supported expansion of the country's nuclear arsenal.

A spokesperson for the Office of Science and Technology Policy said today that the White House has not received a report from the panel reviewing NASA's plans for human space flight (the so-called Augustine commission). The panel has until mid-October, according to its instructions from the NASA Administrator, but members had talked about submitting their report earlier.

—Jeffrey Mervis

See an update to this item here.

The much-ballyhooed report on the future of the U.S. human space program was submitted today to the White House. Or so rumor has it. The so-called Augustine report is the latest in a series of analyses of pressing issues affecting the research community—scientific integrity and biosecurity being the others—that the Obama Administration has chosen to keep under wraps. The pattern of asking experts to study an issue and then not disclosing their recommendations seems at odds with the repeated promises of President Barack Obama to maintain a culture of openness in government.

The chair of a blue-ribbon panel reviewing the U.S. human space program briefed senior Obama Administration science officials today on what's expected to be a frank assessment of NASA's choices. The panel, led by Norman Augustine, held its final public hearing on Wednesday and has promised to give presidential science adviser John Holdren and NASA Administrator Charles Bolden its report by the end of this month. Administration sources say the panel will lay out several policy options ...