ScienceInsider

by Adrian Cho

The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science gets a healthy $226 million funding increase, to $5.12 billion, in the proposed 2011 budget. The lion’s share of the 4.6% increase would be go to the basic energy sciences (BES) office, which funds research into condensed matter physics, materials science, chemistry, and related fields and runs DOE’s x-ray synchrotrons and other user facilities. BES’s budget climbs from $1.637 billion to $1.835 billion, an increase of $198 million or 12.1%.

In contrast, funding for DOE’s fusion energy sciences (FES) program gets clipped from an estimated $426 million this year to a requested $380 million next year, a reduction of 10.8%. That reduction would come out of the United States’s contribution to the international fusion experiment, ITER, which will be built in Cadarache, France. Under the proposed budget, ITER would get $80 million next year, down from an estimated $135 million this year. The decrease marks the latest dip on the ITER budget roller coaster. In 2008, Congress zeroed out $150 million of spending on ITER in a squabble with the White House. The project got $124 million the following year.

by Daniel Clery

The future doesn’t look sunny for Russia’s Koronas-Foton spacecraft, a solar observatory that has been having power system problems since last summer, culminating in a loss of contact in early December. Communications with it were reestablished late last month and controllers in Russia have been trying to recover systems on the craft, but it was reported yesterday that their efforts have so far failed.

Researchers agree that the loss of Koronas-Foton will leave a hole in solar research. “There is nothing yet planned by NASA or ESA [the European Space Agency] that will reproduce all of the Koronas measurements, at least not within the next decade or so,” says Lyndsay Fletcher of the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom.

by Martin Enserink

"Good evening, everybody." That's all Jean Bergougnoux, chair of the panel in charge of France's national debate on nanotechnology, got to say last night at a meeting in Lyon. Immediately after his opening words, some 100 people started clapping, shouting, whistling, and unfurling banners, despite Bergougnoux's protests that the protesters were "antidemocratic." A chaotic hour later, the event was canceled. The same thing had happened at a similar debate in Grenoble in December; at another one in Rennes last week, the audience was forced to leave and the discussion was webcast.

France's Special Commission for the Public Debate on Nanotechnology is organizing a 4-month discussion in 17 cities to inform the public about advances and dilemmas in nanotechnology and to give citizens a chance to express their opinion. But environmentalists dispute the legitimacy of the discussions, which they say are one-sided and a whitewash, and have decided to disrupt them wherever they can. The commission has five more debates scheduled through 23 February, the next one in Marseille on Tuesday. (Hat tip: Sylvestre Huet.)

by Jocelyn Kaiser

A plan to merge Texas's only private medical school with a nearby top research university has collapsed. Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) and Rice University, both in Houston, had been talking for months about joining forces to create a research powerhouse and stabilize Baylor, which is in financial trouble. Rice faculty were bitterly divided about the proposal, however. Today, leaders of the two institutions issued a joint statement saying that they have "ended our discussions" and "decided it is in the best interests of both BCM and Rice University to strengthen the existing relationship without a formal merger."

by Eli Kintisch

The murky nexus between Iran's nuclear program and the political reformists battling the country's current regime became bloody this morning when a bomb killed Massoud Ali-Mohammadi, 50, a physicist at Tehran University. Ali-Mohammadi died when a bomb placed on a motorcycle detonated outside his apartment as he was heading to work. Almost immediately, conflicting views of the researcher's political views emerged.

According to the Los Angeles Times,

Reformist websites and two students also described him as an outspoken supporter of opposition figure Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

Hard-line Iranian officials immediately blamed Israel and the West for the assassination, which came at a time of heightened tension over Iran's nuclear program.

State television described Ali-Mohammadi as a "revolutionary university professor martyred in a terrorist operation by counterrevolutionary agents affiliated" with the West.

Students quoted anonymously in that story say that Ali-Mohammadi recently spoke out against the current regime, abandoning a long-standing position in support of the Revolutionary Guard. One student the Times quoted said the scientist supported the student movement against the government "in his classes."

Ali-Mohammadi's work—he taught "neutron physics" and worked on subatomic particles—is not directly connected to nuclear weapons studies.

There are other reasons to question whether Ali-Mohammadi was killed because of his involvement in the nuclear program.

by Tim Wogan

You might think that the cleverest thing a physicist can do with your food is to explain why dropped toast always lands butter side down (incidentally, they can). But the U.K. House of Lords Science and Technology Committee today released a report noting the increasing ways in which nanotechnology, which concerns itself with particles, processes, and devices on the nanometer scale, has become important to food and food packaging. For example, the molecular structure of plastic beer bottles can be altered so that they retain gases such as carbon dioxide as well as glass ones do—thus making sure the next round has a foamy head.

Some—including the heir to the U.K. throne, Prince Charles—have expressed concern that the union of nanotechnology and food could create unintended dangers.

by Elizabeth Finkel

Yesterday a showdown at the Australian Synchrotron failed to resolve tensions between the warring factions. Synchrotron staff members and the facility's international scientific advisory committee (SAC) demanded an explanation for last month’s sudden sacking of the facility’s director, Robert Lamb, and that the chair of the synchrotron’s governing board, Catherine Walter, resign.

Walter declined to step down, however, and in a prepared speech made available to ScienceInsider, she reiterated the board’s previous position that the reasons for Lamb’s dismissal could not be discussed because of “legal and confidentiality constraints.”

In protest, seven of the nine members of  SAC resigned on Thursday and it is likely that one more will follow. In his resignation letter, SAC member  Michael Grunze, a professor of Applied Physical Chemistry at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, wrote:

by Elizabeth Finkel

This week, at the Australian Synchrotron (AS) in Melbourne, long simmering tensions between staff researchers and the facility’s business-oriented governing board erupted into an open battle. On Monday, scientists at the synchrotron went on strike, temporarily reducing the facility’s normal 24 hour operation to a nine-to-five schedule.  Chemist Frank Larkins, the chair of AS’s international scientific advisory committee (SAC) and a University of Melbourne emeritus professor called for the chair of the board, lawyer Catherine Walters, to step down. “We don’t believe we can solve this without a change of the chair,” he tells ScienceInsider.

Just last September, the US$202 million synchrotron, Australia’s largest scientific investment, seemed to be riding high. It was running at 98% capacity; it hosted an international congress and showcased a dazzling array of applications. The success was attributed to the leadership of its director, Robert Lamb, the University of Melbourne chair of chemistry who has run the institute since its opening in July 2007.  “The institute was seen as a tremendous success”, says Janet Smith, a protein crystallographer at the University of Michigan Medical School and a member of the synchrotron’s SAC.

So it was a shock to the domestic and international scientific community when the synchrotron’s Board unceremoniously sacked Lamb on 30 October.

NEW DELHI—In a setback for astrophysicists, the Indian government, citing environmental concerns, has ruled out construction of the proposed Indian Neutrino Observatory (INO) at its preferred location near the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve in southern India.

During the $167 million project, an underground laboratory would be excavated 2 kilometers deep inside Singara Mountain, where a thick granite overburden would shield a 50,000-ton magnetized iron neutrino detector from cosmic rays. Ecologists have opposed the site because of potential deleterious effects on local elephant populations.

In a 20 November report, the Ministry of Environment and Forests stated that Singara “is ecologically very sensitive owing to its corridor value both for elephants as well as other wild animals.” The ministry urged INO to consider an alternative site that it had investigated earlier: Suruliyar, some 500 kilometers south of Bangalore. “The Suruliyar site should be seriously considered … as the location does not present the type of problems that Singara poses,” environment minister Jairam Ramesh wrote in the report to INO managers.

INO officials have little choice but to ponder the alternative. “We will request the government to at least assure us about the environment and forest clearance [permits], provided the site is found technically alright,” INO Spokesperson Naba K. Mondal, a physicist at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, told the Deccan Herald.

—Pallava Bagla

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.