His beliefs don't interfere with his job, he says. "I believe in natural selection. And in my mind that's how God created the universe," Kendall says. Even so, Kendall finds himself at the center of the latest battle to teach creationism in U.S. public schools.

This week the Indiana state Senate passed a bill allowing schools to teach "various theories of the origins of life." Kendall's boss, Mt. Vernon schools Superintendent William Riggs, reacted to the legislation by telling an Indianapolis newspaper that "as far as I know, we're always been allowed to do that. … And we've been doing this for years."

"We do not have creationism in our curriculum," says Kendall, who chaired the science department for 35 years before stepping down last summer. "But students bring it up whenever you talk about natural selection, and you have to be prepared to respond to them. How can a science teacher go into the classroom and talk about the origins of life and the origins of the universe and not be ready to deal with their questions?"

Many of his students struggle to reconcile what they are learning in school with what their ministers have taught them, says Kendall. "And when they hear about natural selection, some of them wonder, 'Does that mean my entire religion is wrong?' That's a tough situation to be in for a high school student."

The Bible starts out by describing Earth as being without form, Kendall says. And as far as he's concerned, what happens after that squares with evolutionary theory. "I believe in most of the Bible, and I'm very comfortable being a science teacher."

Kendall says that teachers might spend "10 or 15 minutes" a year on the topic as part of a biology or earth sciences class. Still, a teacher should never initiate a conversation with a student on this sensitive topic, he cautions. "You never try to impose your beliefs on a kid. And you never want to attack their faith." But if it does comes up, he says, "I tell my teachers, 'Please don't kill God just to make your point.' "

Not everyone is as careful with their words, however. Kendall says he received a vicious e-mail this week from a teacher in another school district in Indiana denouncing the superintendent's comments. "He says Christianity is a myth and that he's ashamed of us." Kendall's response? "I really don't even know what he's talking about. But why be so hateful?"

Although geologists typically use dynamite or some other method of creating seismic waves in their land-based explorations, for exploration over water they often use air guns. When these devices—which are often towed behind boats—are set off, sharp blasts of pressurized air send shock waves through the water and into underlying sediments, where they trigger seismic vibrations. As doctors take CT scans of the human body, geologists gather such data with a network of seismometer-like receivers and use it to map the structure of rock deposits or other features, such as geological faults, in the region's crust.

Similar networks can be used to monitor subtle, long-term changes in the velocity of seismic waves. These are just the sort of variations that can signify changes in stress buildup along a fault zone, says Baoshan Wang, a geophysicist at the China Earthquake Administration in Beijing. Although studies have noted many such changes in fault zones and volcanic areas, they have relied on natural sources of seismic waves. But those sources vary in strength and occur infrequently, at irregular intervals, and in unpredictable places. As a result, the resolution of images is relatively low, Wang says.

"The challenge is to develop a source of seismic energy that's consistent," says Fenglin Niu, a seismologist at Rice University in Houston, Texas, who is not involved in the team's research. Hence the need for the device that Wang and his colleagues designed. The apparatus, which the researchers call a "transmitting seismic station," consists of four large air tanks, each of which can hold almost 33 liters of air at a pressure of 15 megapascals (or about 153 times atmospheric pressure at sea level).

The team's field tests were conducted last April at a site in China's Yunnan Province, near the center of a 10,000-square-kilometer array of seismometers used to monitor two major faults that intersect nearby. The researchers also temporarily deployed an extra 40 seismometers in the surrounding region during their trials to ensure good coverage, Wang says.

During the tests, the air-gun device was lowered into a small reservoir by a crane and fired 111 times. Data gathered by instruments near the reservoir indicate that all shots generated nearly identical ground motions, equivalent to those that would be produced by a magnitude-0.5 earthquake. Ground motions triggered by a single shot were picked up at a seismometer 112 kilometers away, the researchers report in the current issue of Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union. When data gathered in the wake of all of the shots were superimposed, the ground motions stood out from background seismic noise at instruments more than 240 kilometers away.

Besides having great consistency from one test to another, neither the air-gun blasts nor the ground motions generated by the shots apparently had any effect on wildlife or nearby structures. None of the lake's fish were killed or stunned by the shots, and instruments installed at a dam 1.4 kilometers away from the test site showed that peak ground accelerations were far below those detectable by humans, Wang says. Other possible effects need to be evaluated, he admits, but they are believed to be minimal.

The researchers propose to monitor changes along the nearby faults by firing their device once a week for the next 3 years or more. When data gathered by the regional network of seismometers is combined with that gleaned by global positioning systems and other instruments, scientists may be able to determine how changes in the speeds of seismic waves are related to changing stresses along the faults, Wang says. Those changes, in turn, may give early warning of stress buildup along the faults, one possible sign of a future earthquake.

The team's results are promising, especially in light of recent advances in seismic sensors, Niu says. But he notes potential problems. For one thing, changes in water level at the reservoir could cause changes in stress in the underlying rocks, thereby affecting the speed of seismic waves generated by air-gun blasts. Data gathered during future tests will reveal whether that's an issue, he suggests.

On Tuesday the Indiana Senate approved a bill, S.B. 89, that would have allowed schools to teach "various theories on the origins of life." It didn't specify whether the instruction should occur in a science class or in another setting, but its sponsors made clear that they saw it as a way to challenge prevailing views on scientific evolution. The bill, which passed 28 to 22, drew widespread media coverage and triggered condemnations from scientific organizations in the state and across the country.

The next day, however, the speaker of the Indiana House of Representatives decided that the legislation, which had triggered national media coverage, had become too hot to handle. As reported by Dan Carden of the The Times of Northwest Indiana, House Speaker Brian Bosma, a Republican from Indianapolis, said at a press availability on Wednesday that "delving into an issue that the U.S. Supreme Court has, on at least one occasion, said is not compliant with the Constitution may be a side issue and someplace where we don't need to go." He was apparently referring to a 1987 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that a Louisiana state law requiring the teaching of creation science violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment by advancing religion.

Republicans control both houses of the Indiana legislature. But the amendment to include other religions actually came from a Democrat, state Senator Vi Simpson, from Bloomington, home of Indiana University. Simpson told the Associated Press earlier this week that she hoped local school boards would think twice about sanctioning such a lesson if its religious connections were put front and center. "It does make it clear that a school board can't just say we're only going to teach Christian creation theory," she said. The bill's sponsor, Republican state Senator Dennis Kruse, told AP that he didn't like the change but hoped it would gain him some votes.

State education officials said that they have no plans to prepare a curriculum for such a course and that it would not be part of the state standards that teachers are expected to cover. Any decision to implement such instruction would be left to individual districts, they added. "That means to me they don't want to touch it with a 10-foot pole," says John Staver, co-director of the Center for Research and Engagement in Science and Math Education at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Staver had testified against the bill at a Senate hearing and says he plans to do likewise if it does come before the House.

That prospect seems unlikely after Bosma's comments, however. Any legislation would have to go through committee and clear the full House by 5 March.

Although FAA isn't a science powerhouse—it spends much of its money running airports and building air traffic control systems—the final bill released by a House of Representatives-Senate conference committee on 31 January does include a number of research-related programs.

• Air quality in aircraft cabins. FAA must "determine the extent to which the installation of sensors and air filters on commercial aircraft would provide a public health benefit." However, it also stipulates that "FAA's authority to monitor air quality may not impose significant costs to air carriers and may not interfere with the carrier's normal use of the aircraft."
• Aviation's environmental impacts. Lawmakers dropped a provision in the Senate's version of the bill that called for enabling the FAA administrator to green-light research aimed at reducing "gases and particulates emitted by aircraft." But the final bill does require FAA to work with NASA to develop, within a year, a research plan " to assess the potential effect of aviation on the environment" that includes "an inventory of current interagency research, future research objectives, proposed tasks, milestones, and a 5 year budgetary profile.
• Safety issues posed by aircraft wakes and volcanic eruptions. Congress wants FAA to coordinate with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to reduce risks from bumpy air and volcanic ash.

In addition, several provisions call for the agency to arrange for "independent, external" reviews of research programs, including those involving energy, the environment and safety.

The bill also protects scientists who use lasers in their work. It establishes a prison sentence of up to 5 years for anyone convicted of "knowingly aim[ing] the beam of a laser pointer at an aircraft," but exempts "individuals conducting research and development."

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Six former and current FDA employees last week filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that the agency used spyware to take screenshots of employees' personal e-mail accounts, and also retaliated against them in a number of ways for leaking documents to Congress and the press, including terminating their employment.

On Tuesday, U.S. Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) the senior Republican on the Senate Committee on the Judiciary sent a stern letter to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg reminding the agency that interfering with such disclosures to Congress is illegal. It also asks the agency to answer a number of questions about the affair, including who authorized any surveillance and whether such monitoring is still occurring.

The whistleblowing began in October 2008, when FDA employees complained to Congress. Nine employees, later dubbed the "FDA nine" by FDA officials, next sent a letter to then-President-elect Barack Obama in January 2009 further detailing their complaints. Specifically, they said that "since 2006, FDA physicians and scientists have recommended five times not to approve mammography CAD [computer-aided detection] devices" because they failed to detect breast cancer and led to invasive and unnecessary follow-up work. FDA managers pushed for approving the devices anyway, allegedly "ordering, coercing, and intimidating FDA physicians and scientists to recommend approval, and then retaliating when the physicians and scientists refused to go along."

In March 2009, FDA asked another physician (not part of the FDA nine) to review a colonoscopy device that used computed tomography (CT). The CT device already had FDA approval for some applications, but the manufacturer wanted it used as a general, population-wide screening tool for colon cancer. The physician rejected this use, arguing that the device did not work well and that, because each examination involved getting the equivalent of 800 x-rays, the device might actually cause a small increase in cancer. The FDA approved the device, and the physician complained vociferously.

According to the lawsuit and Freedom of Information Act requests filed by the plaintiffs, at some point during the controversy FDA officials began capturing screenshots of the computers of the people who raised complaints, including screenshots of e-mail programs like Gmail. The monitoring continued for at least 2 years, according to the lawsuit, and Kohn says the captured e-mails included not only whistleblowing business but private messages, including a picture of someone's dog. (When users log in, FDA computers do present a warning noting that employees should have "no reasonable expectation of privacy.")

Kohn claims that FDA managers took the screenshots to determine who the whistleblowers consulted with and where they got their information, and then to widen surveillance to those other people. He says the government has used such tactics before with Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency employees suspected of leaking documents with national security implications, but never before for scientific cases. "It's the first time we've seen heightened surveillance for health and safety issues," he says. "And it will have a chilling effect. Maybe the public doesn't need to know about how many spies we have in Iran, but they do need to know if a device will increase cancer risks."

The lawsuit alleges that the FDA also used the screenshots to harass scientists. FDA officials asked the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Inspector General about the possibility of opening a criminal suit against one whistleblower for releasing unauthorized information. The office rejected the idea. The employee (who worked for the FDA through another agency) later lost his job despite "exceptional" or "fully successful" performance reviews in the previous 3 years, said the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.

Kohn said that his clients learned about the screenshots only this past December, and that the revelation triggered the lawsuit.

Behavioral neuroscientist Karen Ersche of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and colleagues had set out to examine whether drug abusers begin life with miswired brain circuitry or merely end up that way. Imaging studies of addicts show dramatic differences in brain areas involved in motivation, reward, and self-control, to name just a few. But it's less clear whether these differences are the cause or the effect of drug abuse. Because both addiction and brain structure are likely to be inherited traits, many researchers suspect that drug abusers have faulty brain circuitry based in their genes.

To explore the chicken-versus-egg question, Ersche and colleagues worked with 50 pairs of biological siblings; one in each pair was addicted to cocaine or amphetamines while the other had no history of drug abuse. Also included were 50 healthy, drug-free, unrelated volunteers. The researchers first tested the subjects' self-control. Participants pressed a left- or right-arrow key when seeing a similar arrow on a computer screen—unless they heard a tone, in which case they were to do nothing. People with poor self-control, including most drug addicts, find it difficult to refrain from pressing the key; studies show that impaired performance on the test is linked to irregularities in the brain areas involved in addiction.

Much to the researchers' surprise, the siblings who didn't use drugs performed as poorly on the test as the ones who did. All of the sibling pairs did worse than the healthy controls, the team reports in the 3 February issue of Science.

Brain scans also showed that both members of the sibling pairs had abnormal interconnections between parts of the brain that exert control and those involved with drive and reward. Some individual brain structures were abnormal as well; the putamen, which plays a key role in habit formation, was larger in the siblings than in control subjects, as was the medial temporal lobe, which is involved in learning and memory. Because these anomalies appeared in the siblings but not in the unrelated controls, Ersche believes the finding provides a measurable, biological basis for vulnerability to addiction.

Equally intriguing, she adds, is that even among siblings who share so many risk factors for addiction—genes, family environment, brain circuitry, and behavioral test results—"some people just don't go down that road. There must be other factors that convey resilience."

Of course, siblings differ in many ways, including their experiences in life. Imaging specialist Nora Volkow of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Bethesda, Maryland, adds that key differences between the brains of the siblings might account for some of the resilience. For example, in the addicted sibling, an area called the orbitofrontal cortex, which provides for flexibility during changing circumstances, was smaller, possibly making it difficult to break out of compulsive patterns such as drug addiction. Increased activity in this region, on the other hand, is linked to positive emotions, which are thought to protect against addiction.

"The findings are good news," Volkow says. She explains that even in children as young as 4 to 12, traits such as self-control and flexibility can be improved by targeted interventions, including exercise training, martial arts, yoga, and computer games designed to enhance working memory (the ability to hold complex information in mind). These approaches, she says, could be used to help prevent addiction in those at risk for drug abuse.

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Excess carbon dioxide in the air is a double whammy for corals. The increase of this greenhouse gas translates into hotter seas, leading to more bleaching events in which corals lose the algal partners that sustain them. This and acidification can make it harder for corals to grow or even maintain their current size; sometimes they die. The future of coral reefs, centers of marine biodiversity, is a big worry.

Still, it has been difficult for scientists to get a handle on how acidification and rising sea-surface temperatures affect reefs because growth can be so variable and hard to measure long-term. So Timothy Cooper, a marine biologist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Crawley, and his colleagues turned to coral growth bands, which, like tree rings, can be drilled out to reveal the history of the organism. The researchers collected 27 drill cores from a long-lived coral called Porites, which grows up to 5 meters high and is a common reef-building coral in the Indo-Pacific. They sampled six locations spanning 1000 kilometers along the Western Australia coast. By counting backward on the bands, they were able match up the amount of annual growth from 1900 to 2010 with prerecorded sea-surface temperatures for each year.

If acidification were a problem, as some lab studies have indicated it should be, there should have been a decline in coral growth in recent times for all the sites studied. But only one site showed that trend. Instead, at the southernmost—coolest—reef, there was a 23% increase in growth rate since 1900, Cooper and his colleagues report in the 3 February issue of Science. Two other southern sites had increases of about 9% and 5% as well. The temperature is cool enough in those regions that it typically limits coral growth rates, so warming has been helpful, Cooper says. The more northern locations didn't have much change in growth rate.

For now, "the effects of temperature are outweighing the effects of acidification," says Nancy Knowlton, a coral biologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., who was not involved with the study. These findings contrast with results from the Great Barrier Reef, where growth seems to have been slowing since the 1990s.

Roberto Iglesias Prieto, a coral ecophysiologist at the National Autonomous University of México in Cancún, praises the study for including coral samples from high latitudes, where the effects of acidification are expected to be stronger. But marine ecologist Joanie Kleypas of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, cautions that this work assumes that the waters at these locations have experienced ocean acidification at the same rate as the open ocean. Other work, she points out, indicates that acidification can be quite variable. The study did not have any direct measurements of ocean acidity.

In addition, other research has shown that the coral studied by Cooper is relatively insensitive to acidification. "We still know very little about the response of hundreds of other species to climate change," notes Peter Mumby, a marine ecologist at the University of Queensland in Australia, who was not connected to the study. "It is difficult to generalize the specific response of corals to overall climate change."

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As researchers describe in a report published online today in Genome Research, they analyzed the expression of some 12,000 genes—part of the so-called transcriptome—from each species. They found 702 genes in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) of humans that had a pattern of expression over time that differed from the two other species. (The PFC plays a central role in social behavior, working toward goals, and reasoning.) By comparison, genes in the chimpanzee PFC at various life stages had only 55 unique expression patterns—12-fold fewer than found in humans.

The genes the researchers analyzed have myriad functions. But when the researchers created five modules that lumped together genes that were co-expressed, they found that the module in humans that’s most closely tied to synapse formation and function had a “drastically” different developmental trajectory. These genes were turned on high from just after birth until about 5 years of age; the same genes in chimpanzees and macaques began to stop expressing themselves shortly after birth. “We might have discovered one of the differences that makes human brains work differently from chimpanzees and macaques,” says lead researcher Philipp Khaitovich, an evolutionary biologist who works at both the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Shanghai, China.

The researchers, including Svante Pääbo of the Leipzig institute and Xiling Liu of CAS, went a step further and actually counted more than 7000 synapses visible in electron micrographs from the three species at different ages. They found that the number of synapses in macaques and chimpanzees skyrocketed shortly after birth but did not peak in humans until about 4 years of age. “Humans have much more time to form synaptic connections,” Khaitovich concludes.

In their analyses, the researchers factored in that humans have much longer life spans than the other species and develop and mature more slowly in general. Their findings still stood out, even when adjusting for this developmental delay.

The work builds on behavioral evidence that showed the advantages of a prolonged childhood, as well as several other studies that have found differences in chimpanzee and human genes involved with synapse formation and function. But no group has ever done such a thorough comparative, longitudinal analysis of the brain transciptomes of these three species, says Todd Preuss, a neuroscientist at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta. “The whole thing is a technical tour de force,” Preuss says.

Nenad Sestan, a neurobiologist at Yale University who published a comprehensive analysis of the transcriptome of human brains from embryos to late adulthood in the 27 October 2011 issue of Nature, says the new work “is novel and provocative.” Sestan says to clarify differences between the species, the field now needs to examine more brain regions “to have a clearer idea of how specific this may be to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.”

The findings from Khaitovich and colleagues promise to spark future studies that address profound questions about everything from evolution to gene regulation. For example, they suggest in their report that the differences they found may also separate us from Neandertals, as evidence suggests that these extinct humans had faster cranial and dental development than modern humans.

Neurologist Eric Courchesne of the University of California, San Diego, says the new findings also mesh with his own studies of autism and brain overgrowth. Courchesne has found that the brains of autistic children grow more quickly than normal, which he theorizes prevents them from having enough experiences to properly wire neurons. “This is an absolutely fascinating study that will have great importance for advancing understanding of human disorders of early brain development as well as illuminating the evolutionary changes in neural development,” Courchesne says.

"The ICTP decided it is a good idea to use countries like Brazil to create a mirror for them in South America," says Nathan Berkovits, the Buffalo‑born, naturalized Brazilian physicist who is serving as acting director for up to 3 years. "Perhaps the main unique feature of our new institute is its relevance for South American students and researchers, and it is fortunate to be located in a region which is currently accelerating its investment in science and technology," he adds.

A search committee chaired by physicist Peter Goddard of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, will select five scientists to be on the faculty of the center, which will also accommodate a dozen postdocs and visitors. They will be based at the UNESP's Theoretical Physics Institute in São Paulo; the two will share a building and staff.

The ICTP center will begin operation on 6 February with a budget exceeding $1 million, Berkovits said. It will host sessions on relativistic astrophysics and cosmology in July and symbolic computation in November.