ScienceInsider

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.

by Daniel Clery

The scientific and engineering team building the ITER fusion reactor was hoping for a green light today for its final design, schedule, and cost estimate, but given the project has a pricetag in the billions of euros it was never going to be that easy. Because of nagging concerns over the construction schedule of the reactor, the ITER council, which represents the seven international partners in the project—China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and the United States—did not give the expected rubber stamp to the thousands of pages of documents that fully define the project. 

ITER is an experimental reactor that aims to show that nuclear fusion, the power source of the sun and stars, could be used practically to generate energy on earth. A site has been cleared at Cadarache in southern France for construction, and ITER staff have been racing for months to get the full documentation, known as the project baseline, ready for the 18–19 November council meeting at their headquarters. But some council members voiced concern that the schedule, which aimed for the reactor to be running by 2018, was not realistic and that there was too high a risk that some part of the immensely complicated worldwide manufacturing effort would go wrong.

Delays invariably mean increased costs and the council is already concerned over current cost estimates which, sources says, may be as high as twice what partners signed up to at the start of the project in 2006. So the council has now sent ITER staff away for 3 months to better nail down the risks, both technical and organizational, involved in the schedule. Staff must consult with the agencies run by each partner that will order the reactor components to be made, and with the companies that will make them. The council has asked ITER directors to come back in February with an earliest possible date when the reactor could start, if everything were to go right, and a latest possible start date. Discussion of the controversial cost estimates appears to have been put aside until the schedule has been resolved.

by Jeffrey Mervis

Has science become a one-party issue in Congress?

A coalition of university organizations with a new Web site touting the benefits to the country from the $21 billion being spent on basic research via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) hopes that the answer is no. But the absence of Republicans from the dias at today's Capitol Hill event was a reminder that not a single House of Representatives Republican voted for the Recovery Act back in February because of fears that the $787 billion stimulus package would break the bank.

With both houses of Congress getting ready to take up legislation to overhaul the Toxic Substances Control Act, a new poll out today reveals that most Republicans and Independents, as well as Democrats, say that existing chemical control laws in the United States aren't strong enough. Richard Denison of the Environmental Defense Fund offers his thoughts here.

Imperfect as they may be, existing chemical regulations have done the trick to help restore populations of the brown pelican, which was removed from the federal Endangered Species List yesterday.

In hopes of staving off future problems, the American Chemical Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry pledged to cooperate and contribute to global efforts to come up with sustainable food, water, and energy supplies.

by Richard A. Kerr

The Mars rover that has been stuck in talcum-powder-like soil the past 6 months is in a bad way, its NASA team reported in a press conference today. After months of analysis and testing here on Earth, "we haven't found a clear solution to how to get Spirit out of its predicament," said project manager John Callas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Monday, the team will start spirit on its best bet—"the path of least resistance"—by trying to send it out the way it came in.

 

by Jeffrey Mervis

The American Institute of Physics is looking for undergraduates with Potomac Fever. The new AIP Mather Public Policy Intern Program aims to broaden the institute's summer research internships to include students interested in science policy. It is funded through a foundation set up by John Mather, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, using money from his 2006 Nobel Prize award.

The program hopes to place two upper-level undergraduates in positions on Capitol Hill. The application deadline is 1 February for the 2010 summer program, which runs for 10 weeks. For more information, contact Gary White at gwhite@aip.org.  

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.