ScienceInsider

by Adrian Cho

Adléne Hicheur, the French physicist arrested 8 October on charges of having ties to Algerian terrorists, did not hide his religious convictions. The acknowledgements in his 2003 doctoral thesis in particle physics begin: “First of all, I would like to thank Him who gave me the strength, perseverance, and endurance necessary to bring this work to its completion." The devout Hicheur was friendly and easy to work with, say former colleagues.

Hicheur, 32, was arrested by French authorities along with the younger of his two brother at the apartment in Vienne that his parents settled in after immigrating from Algeria more than 30 years ago. His brother was released after 2 days, but Hicheur remains in custody on charges of having ties with Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, a North African branch of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network, according to press reports. Adléne was a year old when the family arrived in France, the older of his brothers, Halim Hicheur, 30, said in an e-mail. The family of eight grew up in modest circumstance but “did not suffer from that,” says Halim Hicheur, who holds a Ph.D. in physiology and biomechanics from the University of Paris VI.

Hicheur’s arrest grabbed headlines internationally primarily because, as a post-doc at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL), he was working on an experiment at the world’s largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland.

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 Jeffrey Mervis

A senior U.S. National Institutes of Health official took a step toward mending fences with the chair of the Senate Small Business Committee today by assuring her that the agency is doing its best to give small businesses their rightful share of stimulus funding for research.

Senator Mary Landrieu (D–LA) has been steamed by a clause in the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that allowed NIH to exempt its slice, some $7.3 billion, from the 2.5% tax on every federal agency's research budget that funds the 27-year-old Small Business Innovation Research program. So she included Sally Rockey, NIH's acting head of extramural research, in a oversight hearing on how the stimulus funds have affected small businesses.

Rockey told Landrieu that NIH wasn't getting enough high-quality SBIR proposals—the number of applicants had dropped by almost half since 2003—to warrant expanding the program.

by Eli Kintisch

The U.S. House of Representatives has approved a $33.5 billion spending bill for energy and water spending in fiscal year 2010, and Senate action could come next week. In the joint House-Senate spending bill that was hammered out yesterday, Department of Energy's Office of Science, which supports most U.S. physical science, was awarded a 2.7% boost.

From the press release:

Office of Science: $4.9 billion, $131 million above 2009, for scientific research critical to addressing long-term energy needs. This funding, in addition to the $4.8 billion appropriated in fiscal year 2009 and $1.6 billion in the Recovery Act, exceeds the goals in the America COMPETES Act.

by Eli Kintisch

In Part I, ScienceInsider interviewed a fire investigator on the topic of arson and forensic science in the United States, an issue brought to the forefront by the controversial execution of Todd Willingham in Texas in 2004. Now we conducted an email interview with a member of the landmark National Research Council panel which in February found "a tremendous need for the forensic science community to get better." Jay Siegel is the director of the Forensic and Investigative Sciences Program at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

Q: How did the flaws laid out in the Willingham case reflect on larger issues about forensic science in the United States?

J.S.: First, it is necessary to distinguish what happened in the Willingham case from the practice of forensic science in the U.S. as explored by the National Academy of Sciences [NAS] Committee that looked at forensic science. The problems with the Willingham case arose from inadequate training and experience of the fire scene investigators. ... The issues that the NAS Committee dealt with concerned the status of laboratory forensic science rather than crime scene investigation. Although CSI should be more scientifically based and should fall within the purview of forensic science, it is generally considered to be part of the law enforcement process. Crime scene investigation training stresses observation and data collection but not critical thinking and scientific analysis. This is what leads to the tragic outcome in the Willingham case.

Q: What impact has the Innocence Project had on the issue?

by Eli Kintisch

In February, a landmark report by the National Research Council (NRC) in February criticized nearly every aspect of the nation's forensics science system, including unreliable techniques for analyzing hair and DNA samples—a problem the U.S. Senate has been addressing in recent hearings.

But the NRC report said almost nothing about arson. So ScienceInsider conducted an email interview with John Lentini (left), a nationally known fire investigator who conducted an outside review of the controversial case of Todd Willingham, a convicted arsonist who was executed in 2004. Tomorrow, we will run an interview with Jay Siegel, a scientist who served on the NRC panel.

Q: What went wrong in Texas, and why? How widespread are such flaws in supposedly scientific forensic investigations?

J.L.: The only thing unique about Texas with respect to miscarriages of justice stemming from faulty arson convictions is that Texas is a profligate user of the death penalty, making it impossible to take back its harshest punishment. Actually, there are wrongful convictions for arson all over the United States. Because there is no DNA involved, and because the investigators only document the scene to the extent necessary to "prove" arson, it is exceedingly difficult to obtain a reversal of a wrongful conviction.

Most fire investigators were trained by mentors who were trained by mentors, who passed on belief systems based on anecdotal experience rather than on chemistry and physics.

Two workhorses of the U.S. Antarctic research program may need to be put out to pasture because the fuel they burn is likely to be banned from the Southern Ocean. Officials at the National Science Foundation, which runs the program, told the National Science Board yesterday that they are trying to figure out how to compensate for the anticipated loss of the two ships.

The tanker USNS Lawrence H. Gianella and the cargo ship USNS American Tern are part of the U.S. Military Sealift Command and are used to deliver supplies and equipment to McMurdo Station. But both ships use a heavy grade of fuel oil that would do serious environmental damage to the region if there were a large spill. In 2005, the 45 nations that have signed the Antarctic Treaty agreed to ask the International Maritime Organization to prevent the stuff from being carried or used below the 60˚ south latitude, and last month, IMO's marine environmental panel embraced the idea. IMO, of which the U.S. is a member, is expected to approve the ban at its meeting in March 2010, effective July 2011. The biggest impact is expected to be on cruise ships plying the Southern Ocean.

A former employee at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Palo Alto, California, was arrested Monday for allegedly destroying at least 4000 protein crystal samples by removing them from cryogenic containers at the lab and leaving them out to thaw. Documents released by the FBI estimate it will cost $500,000 to reproduce and process the lost samples.

The FBI claims that Silvya Oommachen, 32, a former laboratory assistant, has admitted that she slipped into the lab on 18 July and emptied the containers, leaving behind three Post-it notes, the San Jose Mercury News reports:

She signed one as her alter ego "X Black” and in the others referred to a sexual act and the date and time the protein crystal samples were sabotaged, according to the affidavit.

Proponents of the idea that an impact wiped out the mammoths and roiled early North American human culture have struck out, at least by baseball’s rules. Their third paper in a leading journal offering evidence of a devastating impact 12,900 years ago is, like its predecessors, failing to convince experts. The six experts who read the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) paper for Science either could find no convincing evidence for nano-scale diamond crystals of the sort an impact might produce, or if impact nanodiamonds are there, the researchers don’t see how they prove an impact. “I’m still not convinced diamonds have been found,” says research physicist Tyrone Daulton of Washington University in St. Louis in Missouri. “It could be [impact diamond], it could be something else.”

This PNAS paper, published 20 July online before print, is the third from the same group claiming evidence of impact nanodiamonds. The first claim, in an earlier PNAS paper and using carbon-13 nuclear magnetic resonance, proved to be baseless (Science, 7 March 2008, p. 1331). The second, in a Science paper using transmission electron microscopy (TEM), fared better, but most outside experts remained unconvinced that nanodiamonds had been found (Science, 2 January, p. 26).