ScienceInsider

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.

*The headline of this story has been changed, see note at end.

by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

It's an article of faith: the United States needs more native-born students in science and other technical fields. The National Academies' influential Rising Above the Gathering Storm report in 2006 said the nation should "enlarge the pipeline of students who are prepared to enter college and graduate with a degree in science, engineering, or mathematics" to remain competitive. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce had a similar message on the gap in so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) students a year before. President Barack Obama has pushed for more science teachers and training for the same reason.

But a new paper contradicts the notion of a shrinking supply of native-born talent in United States.  "Those who advocate increasing the supply of STEM talent should cool their ardor a little bit," says one of its authors, B. Lindsay Lowell, a demographer at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee
Since being established 6 years ago, the Science and Technology Directorate of the Department of Homeland Security has been the black sheep (subs. required) of the federal scientific community, with lawmakers criticizing it from time to time for poor management, shoddy accounting, and cluelessness over the setting of priorities. At a House of Representatives hearing this afternoon on how the directorate is doing, legislators discussed yet another concern: the lack of peer review in funding research projects.

Cindy Williams, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher who chaired a study of the S&T directorate at the behest of the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), told the House Science Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation that DHS was awarding "many basic research projects" without "competition or peer review." She suggested that the directorate follow the example of other science agencies like the National Science Foundation in giving out grants, and "that funds be awarded on a competitive basis based on scientific peer review except in cases when that is clearly not feasible."

by Eli Kintisch

Reuters on the conclusion of a 3-year case on the disgraced researcher in Korea:

"He was guilty of fabrication," the Seoul court said in a verdict in the trial that stretched more than three years and included painstaking details about the scientific work Hwang and his team had performed at Seoul National University.

The court also said that Hwang illegally diverted a portion of the money he received for research for his personal use.

"But he has shown he has truly repented for his crime," the court said in its verdict. Hwang's supporters, who have packed the court for each hearing, broke into applause when the court sentenced Hwang to two years in jail, suspended for three years.

Prosecutors had sought a 4-year term, but if Hwang stays out of trouble for the next 3 years he won't serve jail time, says The Scientist.

by Andrew Lawler

NASA should consider extending space shuttle launches into 2011 rather than ending the program next fall, flying the international space station at least until 2020, and boosting spending on its flagging technology programs. That’s the verdict of a blue-ribbon panel which today released its full report on the future of the U.S. human space flight effort.

The panel, chaired by retired aerospace executive Norman Augustine, released its summary conclusions 7 September, but the full detail backing up that document is now available.

At a 1p.m. press briefing at Washington, D.C.’s National Press Club, panel members suggested that NASA’s replacement for the space shuttle may be the wrong ship going to the wrong destination. Instead of moving ahead with a government-built Ares-1 rocket with a capsule on top called the Orion, Augustine and Edward Crawley, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineer and panel member, said that NASA instead might rope in private industry for a joint effort to build a less ambitious vehicle that could be ready by 2016—rather than 2017 or later than Ares is likely to fly. That cheaper rocket could take astronauts to the space station well before its demise, which now is slated for 2016.

by Jeffrey Mervis and Adrian Cho

Watch out, Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—the U.S. is not quitting the race to find the famed Higgs boson just yet.

If all goes as planned, physicists at the last dedicated U.S. particle physics laboratory will get to run their particle smasher an extra year. The Department of Energy has requested money in its next budget to run the Tevatron Collider at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, in 2011. That proposal would give Fermilab researchers a shot at bagging a long-sought particle called the Higgs boson before scientists at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, can spot it with the more-powerful LHC, which is supposed to finally start smashing particle in December.

"I'm behind it, and the Secretary [Steven Chu] is behind it, too," William Brinkman, head of DOE's Office of Science, told ScienceInsider this morning during a meeting of the office's High Energy Physics Advisory Panel in Washington, D.C. "There's a lot of competition" for the approximately $20 million that would be needed, says Brinkman, "but we think there's an opportunity for us to make progress, and we want to do it." The proposal is part of the department's budget request now being reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget prior to the submission of the president's 2011 budget request to Congress in February.

Physicists believe the Higgs boson is key to explaining how all particles gain mass—as Higgs bosons lurking “virtually” in the vacuum drag on all particles.