ScienceInsider

By Adrian Cho

For the first time in more than a year, protons should soon be whizzing around the world’s biggest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), officials at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, have announced. Within the next several hours, physicists at the lab near Geneva, Switzerland, aim to have beams of particle making complete laps through the 27-kilometer-long ring-shaped accelerator. That would get them back to where they were on 19 September 2008, when the LHC suffered a catastrophic failure just 9 days after researchers first fed particles all the way around it. “Keep your fingers crossed for us,” says Steve Myers, CERN’s director of accelerators and technology.

After researchers achieve stable circulating beams, they will likely try to accelerate them to an unprecedented energy of 1.2 tera-electron volts—only 1/6 of the LHC’s design energy of 7 TeV per beam. “The dream scenario is that people come to work Monday morning and find that we’ve broken the world record for energy,” says CERN spokesperson James Gillies.

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 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 Jocelyn Kaiser

A new group is adding its voice to the furor over the influence of drug money on medical research and practice, saying there should be more money to study the problem. In a letter today to National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, 100 physicians, medical ethicists, and others call for funding: 

The recent disclosure of ghostwritten articles, physician payoffs, and the use of academic opinion leaders to increase markets for FDA-regulated products indicate that ethical lapses may permeate biomedical research. ...

In your role as the director of “the steward of medical and behavioral research for the Nation,” we ask that you acknowledge the research gap on the effect of conflicts of interest and commercial influence on medical decisionmaking ...

Between bench and bedside lies a path treacherous with ethical quandaries. NIH is the best place to launch and support a scientifically rigorous inquiry into the state of research ethics, industry-academic relationships, and the effect of these relationships on human health. There is currently no identifiable mechanism through which NIH would fund this research.

by Antonio Regalado

In a potential boost to climate negotiators meeting next month in Copenhagen, Brazil’s government today said it would aggressively cut the pace of growth of its greenhouse-gas emissions.

Brazil’s plan, announced in Brasilia by chief minister Dilma Rousseff and environmental chief Carlos Minc, would lower the country’s greenhouse emissions by 36% to 39% in 2020 compared with levels under a “do nothing” scenario. Under the plan, which Brazil's negotiators will present at the Copenhagen talks, about half of Brazil’s greenhouse gains would come by putting the brakes on clear-cutting in the Amazon forest. This week, the government said deforestation had hit a 21 year low, citing satellite surveys.

Though voluntary and not binding, Brazil’s economy-wide targets are the most aggressive proposal yet by a major emerging economy. It’s something “no other developing nation has done” or even publicly discussed, said Stephan Schwartzman, director for tropical forest policy at the Environmental Defense Fund in Washington, D.C.

Brazil’s move could turn up the heat on U.S. and Chinese negotiators at the United Nations climate summit starting December 7th in Copenhagen. China and the United States are the world’s two largest emitters, but neither has been willing to agree to binding limits. “Politically, as long as the U.S. won't put numbers on the table, either for targets or finance, the big developing countries won't commit to anything,” said Schwartzman.

by Eli Kintisch

Scientists and policy experts will meet in March next year for a 5 day meeting to hash out rules for conducting field experiments on the controversial topic of geoengineering, ScienceInsider has learned. Styled after the landmark 1975 Asilomar conference on recombinant DNA, the conference has drawn support from top climate scientists and environmental groups. But it also faces questions and criticism about its openness and the backgrounds of some of the organizers.

Yesterday’s hearing by the House of Representatives Science and Technology Committee—the first by Congress on the topic—underscores the accelerating interest in geoengineering, the deliberate tinkering with the environment to reverse global warming. The March meeting aims to be a forum for “scientists with expertise in climate engineering together with experts on risk management, governance, and ethics," said marine biologist Margaret Leinen, president of the Climate Response Fund, a new nonprofit set up to support geoengineering research. The Response Fund has partnered with Nobel Prize-winning biologist Paul Berg, who organized the 1975 event at the Asilomar conference center grounds in northern California, where the March event will also be held.

Many scientists believe that small or medium scale field trials may be needed to understand the risks of large-scale geoengineering projects. "There's a very legitimate concern about whether there would be risks associated with the research itself," said Leinen. Starting on 22 March, she hopes to convene 150 experts to examine the risks of a variety of different geoengineering methods, ranging from growing algae blooms at sea to sucking carbon dioxide or dimming the sun with particles sprayed into the upper atmosphere.

by Jeffrey Mervis

Senator Tom Coburn (R–OK) finally got his long-awaited roll-call vote last night to strip out political science research from the 2010 budget of the National Science Foundation. And while his amendment was soundly defeated, 36 to 62, it wasn't strictly a party-line vote. Five moderate Democrats—Senators Max Baucus of Montana, Evan Bayh of Indiana, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, and Jim Webb of Virginia—apparently agree with Coburn's argument that NSF, with a budget of $6.9 billion, is "wasting" federal dollars by spending $9 million a year to support research in the field.

"I have no way to explain it," says Michael Brintnall, executive director of the American Political Science Association, which has been following the issue closely. "We'd never heard that they had any concerns about funding this type of research."

The amendment came as the Senate cleared a $65-billion spending bill that funds multiple agencies, including NSF, NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The next step is to resolve differences between its version and the one passed this summer by the House of Representatives. Congress has completed work on only four of 12 spending bills for the fiscal year that began on 1 October. The rest of the government is covered by a continuing resolution, holding spending at 2009 levels, that expires on 18 December.

by Jon Cohen

With reporting by Martin Enserink.

Although the world’s attention is focused on the novel H1N1 virus causing the swine flu pandemic, H3N2, a seasonal strain of influenza, has popped up in many East Asian countries—and some variants in circulation may outfox the seasonal vaccine in use. “We have seen that H3N2 viruses have been in fairly broad circulation in some of the countries there,” Keiji Fukuda, special adviser on pandemic to the director-general of the World Health Organization, said at a press conference today.

The H3N2 strain is one of three in the seasonal influenza vaccines. But if the H3N2 strain in circulation differs substantially from the one used to make the vaccine, the vaccine may offer less protection, and more people will get sick than usual. “For the current H3N2, we don't have such studies, so I can't tell you right now the degree the current seasonal vaccine will protect against the H3N2 virus,” Fukuda says.

Less than 2 years ago, Princeton agriculture expert Tim Searchinger published a paper in Science that sought to quantify how growing biofuels on cropland in the United States could lead to deforestation abroad. He estimated in some cases that indirect emissions could lead to a doubling of emissions associated with corn ethanol. Previously, researchers thought using the fuel could cut emissions by 30% since it would replace gasoline. Rarely do scientists have as immediate an impact on government policy. Since Searchinger’s paper was published, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, spurred by Congress, has been mulling whether to take so-called indirect land use into account when calculating the carbon footprint of biofuels for new regulations it is crafting, expected by December. Critics say Searchinger’s calculations were faulty and that uncertainties made it impossible to gauge their effects.

Right now, indirect land use related to biofuels isn’t included in proposed climate change legislation in the U.S. Senate, as well as proposed agreements that will be on the table in Copenhagen. In a recent policy piece published in Science, Searchinger and colleagues wrote that such a policy "erroneously treats all bioenergy as carbon neutral,” calling it a major "accounting error."

To discuss these issues, Insider conducted an e-mail conversation with Searchinger and John Sheehan, an expert on biofuels at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

by Greg Miller

Can a genetic disorder that derails brain development be cured with a drug? A clinical trial announced today represents the first step towards testing a drug therapy for Fragile X syndrome, the most common inherited cause of intellectual disability. The trial will enroll healthy volunteers and assess the safety of a drug that blocks a type of glutamate receptor thought to be overactive in people with Fragile X. Experts have long assumed that once the brain is wired wrong during development that it can't be fixed by simply giving someone a drug.