Reif, who has been an MIT faculty member since 1980, became the institute's chief academic officer in 2005. During his tenure, Reif presided over the development of Web projects that offer MIT and Harvard University courses online for free and led faculty efforts to recruit and retain minorities and women.

Faculty, staff, and students got a chance to welcome the president-elect and his family at a campus reception this afternoon.

In the 11 May decision, the high court voted 3 to 2 to invalidate the recent approval of the Río Cuervo dam in Chile's Aysén region. The justices ruled that project backers had not completed a required geological survey before a regional government agency approved the project. The dam's approval "is unlawful" because the agency hadn't considered "the indicated ground survey that, in the opinion of this Court, is essential for the approval or rejection of the project."

The decision "is clearly a radical change in the historical judgments of the Supreme Court," said Fernando Dougnac, attorney for the Environmental Prosecutor's Office, which filed the challenge on behalf of local residents opposed to the dam. It confirms that "studies should be performed before the decision is made," he said.

The project has been controversial. The proposed dam and a 13,000 hectare reservoir would be located on the Liquiñe-Ofqui fault, which was involved in the recent eruptions of the Chaitén and Hudson volcanoes, and in a 2007 earthquake that killed 10 people near the city of Puerto Aysén.

Energía Austral noted that "in no way should the court's ruling be understood as a rejection of the project under evaluation," and said it will renew its effort to have the project approved and will complete the required geological survey within 6 to 12 months.

The decision also appears to open the door to challenging another major hydroelectric project in Patagonia: the $10 billion HidroAysén project, which plans to build five dams on the Pascua and Baker rivers and flood 5910 hectares. The same regional commission that approved the Río Cuervo dam gave the green light to the megaproject in May 2011, also without considering a number of incomplete studies.

Government officials say they will respect the decision, which overturns a long-standing practice of allowing project planners to carry out some environmental studies after project approval but before construction. "Now the Supreme Court has applied a change of opinion, of course, we will abide," said Ignacio Toro of Chile's National Environmental Commission.

Mind-melding between animals and machines isn't new; researchers have been attempting it since the 1970s. Past studies in brain-machine interfaces have enabled monkeys to control robotic arms and paralyzed people to control cursors on a screen. But researchers didn't know if humans could control robotic arms to perform finer, more complex tasks, such as maneuvering in three dimensions and grasping a small object without moving it or knocking it over.

John Donoghue, a neuroscientist at Brown University who led the cursor-controlling experiment, and colleagues tested the idea on two patients with "locked-in" syndrome. "S3," a 58-year-old woman, suffered a brainstem stroke 15 years ago that left her without the ability to move any of her limbs or speak. "T2," a 66-year-old man who survived a brainstem stroke in 2006, can move only his eyes and head.

Each patient had an array of electrodes about the size of a baby aspirin implanted in his or her motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls voluntary movements. The array, called BrainGate, reads a pattern of brain signals and then sends them via wires to an external computer that translates it into a command. A certain pattern of activity might tell a robotic arm to move right or left; another might raise or lower it. Calibrating the device to patients' brain activity took about half an hour; they weren't trained to use the implant.

Using only their thoughts to control the robotic arm, S3 and T2 were able to reach out and touch a series of 6-centimeter foam ball targets 49% to 95% of the time in over 200 trials. Two-thirds of the reaches resulted in successful grasping. S3 was also able to lift a bottle from a table, bring it to her lips, and sip coffee from it through a straw.

"This was the first time in 15 years that she was able to drink on her own," says study co-author Leigh Hochberg, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. "And the smile on her face was something my colleagues and I won't forget." The results, reported online today in Nature, suggest the technology could help patients with brain or spinal injuries recover some of the movement everyday activities require. The study also quells concerns that the implants lose their signal-reading capabilities over time. The researchers acknowledge some deterioration in S3's array, which was implanted more than 5 years ago—but it is still fully capable of recording her brain activity for control of the robotic arm.

"This is quite a step forward," says Andrew Jackson, a neuroscientist at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom who was not involved in the study. "It's also a good demonstration of why basic science matters—because it can lead to applications that can significantly improve patients' quality of life."

In the past 10 years, the widely reported suicides and accidental deaths of professional football players and other athletes—such as that of Junior Seau earlier this month -- have sparked inquiries into whether even seemingly minor blows to the head can cause personality changes, dementia, and brain degeneration later in life. Autopsies of dozens of former players have revealed a condition known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Its hallmark is the abnormal accumulation of a protein called tau. Many of the athletes diagnosed with CTE on autopsy (currently the only definitive test) had a history of problems with anger, rash and risky decision-making, impairments of memory and attention, and alcohol or drug abuse.

Clinicians and researchers working with troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have seen similar symptoms. The new study, led by Lee Goldstein, a physician-scientist who focuses on neurodegenerative disease at Boston University, and Ann McKee, a neuropathologist at the Bedford Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Massachusetts, ties these troublesome threads together.

McKee examined the brains of four veterans, men between the ages of 22 and 45, who suffered from various combinations of cognitive, emotional, and impulse-control problems before dying from suicide or other causes. Under the microscope, she found tangles of tau and damage to axons, the spindly extensions that convey signals from one neuron to another. In athletes with CTE, these abnormalities occur primarily in the frontal lobes of the brain, McKee says. In the blast-injured veterans, the pathology is more evenly distributed. "But when you look microscopically, it's very, very similar," she says.

"Whether there is a relationship between CTE and blast … is definitely a question that we feel needs to be answered," says Colonel Dallas Hack, a physician who coordinates trauma research for the U.S. Armed Forces. In his view, the new cases are suggestive but not conclusive. He notes that three of the four cases had previous concussions from sports, fights, and accidents, and one was not exposed to a blast in combat. "Was their military service part of the cause? We don't know that yet."

Mouse experiments presented in the new paper, published online today in Science Translational Medicine, may provide a clue. They bolster the case that blasts cause brain pathology because the mice were exposed to a blast and nothing else, says co-author Goldstein. The researchers placed the rodents in a 4.5-meter-long tube and used compressed gas to create a shock wave comparable to what a soldier might experience from a blast at close range. The setup differed from previous blast tube experiments in that the animals' heads were unrestrained. This more closely mimics what happens in combat by allowing the so-called bobblehead effect, in which a blast momentarily causes the head to flop back and forth on the neck, Goldstein says.

In these experiments, 2 weeks after exposure to a single blast, mice exhibited accumulations of chemically modified, or phosphorylated, tau in their brains, suggesting that the pathological process that leads to the fully formed tangles seen in the veterans' brains was already underway. Blast-exposed mice also exhibited inflammation and damage to axons and capillaries in the brain.

The researchers also found sick and dying neurons in the hippocampus, a brain region important for learning and memory. Given the common complaints of forgetfulness and other cognitive problems in veterans, Goldstein and colleagues followed up with additional experiments that revealed abnormalities in the electrical signaling of hippocampal neurons in blast-exposed mice, as well as learning and memory deficits on a maze test. These deficits did not occur when the researchers immobilized the head of a mouse during a blast, which suggests to Goldstein that it's the whipsaw motion of the head that initiates the injury.

"This is a really good piece of work," says David Hovda, a neuroscientist who studies brain injury at the University of California, Los Angeles. Researchers have long debated whether the biomechanics of blast injuries are distinct from those of other types of head injuries, he notes. The new study argues instead that blasts injure the brain by causing acceleration and deceleration of the head: "That would mean we're looking at the same type of injury in Afghanistan that we're looking at on the football field or in a car accident."

Going forward, a major question for both athletes and military personnel is the number and type of hits it takes to cause CTE, says Daniel Perl, a neuropathologist at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. Perl has funding from the Army to create a brain bank repository that he hopes will enable researchers to connect the dots between head injuries, clinical problems, and neuropathology. Such work will help determine whether CTE becomes a bugbear for veterans as it has for athletes.

A longer version of this article will appear in the 18 May issue of Science.

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The release of the new Statement of Principles for Scientific Merit Review followed a meeting of 47 research leaders hosted by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) at its headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. "I am very pleased that pretty much everyone we invited came," said NSF Director Subra Suresh, who has been looking for ways to foster international research cooperation. The 2-day Global Summit on Merit Review capped a year-long effort to develop the new statement, which highlights six "key elements necessary for a rigorous and transparent review system." They include the use of expert assessment of proposals and a transparent, impartial, and confidential review process.

"These are not necessarily all-inclusive principles," Suresh said at a press conference today, "but they are basic principles we all agreed on." Such agreement could help smooth the way for multinational research projects, he noted.

Suresh also formally announced the creation of GRC, which he said will be a "voluntary, … virtual organization" designed to foster discussion of "shared goals, aspirations, and principles, and provide a vehicle to unify science across the globe." It is not intended to be "a new bureaucracy," he emphasized, and each member agency will cover its costs for participating. GRC also will not, at least for the time being, get involved in funding international research projects, Suresh said. Instead, the goal is to create forum for "high-level discussions" of more general policy issues.

Now that it has hashed out the merit review principles, GRC will focus on developing common views on safeguarding research integrity and expanding open access, said science chiefs from Brazil and Germany, which will lead the effort. Both are "important" topics "in every laboratory in the world," said physicist Glaucius Oliva, president of Brazil's National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, the nation's lead research funding agency.

Suresh said the discussions should not only help long-established funders to fine-tune their practices, but also help developing nations by providing model practices and policies. GRC wants to ensure that "there is no disconnect between established institutions and those that are just getting started," he said. The group will also provide a forum for discussing how nations can balance "cooperation and competition" in science, Kleiner said, and consider how their funding practices contribute to both national goals and global needs.

GRC expects to hold its first regional meetings on the two new topics later this year.

All told, 86% of the 258 major stocks reviewed by NOAA are in good shape.

But more remains to be done. Forty-five stocks remain overfished (the population is below the target) and 36 others are still "subject to overfishing," or, in other words, being caught at too high a rate. Both of these metrics, however, improved slightly from the previous year.

In a teleconference, Galen Tromble of NOAA's Office of Sustainable Fisheries credited the gains to the annual catch limits required by federal law and the rebuilding plans implemented by regional fisheries councils.

The six stocks now ready for guilt-free eating are:

• Northeast: Gulf of Maine Haddock
• Mid-Atlantic: Summer Flounder
• Northwest: Widow Rockfish, Chinook Salmon, Coho Salmon
• Alaska: Bering Sea Snow Crab

Homo sapiens first colonized Europe from Africa around 40,000 years ago. But until the early 1990s, there was little firm evidence that our species engaged in sophisticated artistic activity that early. Many archaeologists assumed that modern humans developed their artistic skills only gradually, culminating in spectacular galleries like the 15,000-year-old painted caves at Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain. The discovery of Chauvet changed all that and convinced most researchers that early artists had brought their skills with them from Africa.

Yet for years Chauvet seemed to stand alone, leading some archaeologists to question whether its dating—based in large part on radiocarbon samples taken directly from its charcoal paintings—was correct. Nevertheless, evidence for other art of about the same age continued to accumulate. At Fumane Cave in Italy, for example, archaeologists found depictions of animals and what appeared to be a half-human, half-beast figure, dated to about 37,000 years ago or even older, although the error ranges for the dates were fairly wide.

Since 1994, the year of Chauvet's discovery, a team led by archaeologist Randall White of New York University in New York City has been working at the Abri Castanet, a rock shelter (a shallow cave usually at the base of a cliff) in southern France's Vezere valley. Originally excavated in the early 20th century, the Abri Castanet has long been considered one of the earliest modern human sites in Europe, with occupation layers dated back to nearly 40,000 years ago. White's excavations have uncovered considerable evidence of symbolic and artistic activity at the site, including hundreds of pierced snail shells apparently used as ornaments and three limestone blocks adorned with engravings, including one the team interprets as a vulva. But the blocks, which came from the shelter's collapsed roof, were impossible to date because they do not contain the kind of organic matter necessary for radiocarbon analysis.

In 2007, however, the team began excavating another large block that had fallen from the roof and directly onto a segment of the cave floor once occupied by prehistoric humans. As White and his colleagues broke the stone slab into sections and lifted them out, they discovered that the underside had been engraved with another vulva-like image (see photo). When they sent the bones of reindeer and other animals from the cave floor to the University of Oxford's radiocarbon dating lab for analysis, the dates clustered tightly between 36,000 and 37,000 years ago. And because there was no accumulation of sediments or other deposits between the archaeological layer and the stone slab, the team argues that the painted cave ceiling must be at least as old as the bones.

That would mean that the artworks at Abri Castanet are also at least as old as those at Chauvet, White and co-workers conclude in a paper published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Because these images of vulvas are very different from the charcoal and ochre drawings at Chauvet, the team thinks that regional differences in artistic traditions were already established in Europe by that time, even at sites like Chauvet and Abri Castanet that are only a few hundred kilometers apart.

One key difference, White says, is that whereas the paintings at Chauvet are hidden deep within that cave and away from living areas, the depictions at Abri Castanet were on the rock shelter ceiling right above the spaces where prehistoric humans slept and ate, making them a kind of everyday and public art.

Harold Dibble, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania, says the team's dating of the vulva engraving appears sound because it cannot be any younger than the surface onto which it fell and might even be older. "The context of the find is quite clear," Dibble says. As for the long-standing tradition among archaeologists working in France of interpreting such images as vulvas, Dibble says, "Who the hell knows" what they really represent? Dibble adds that such interpretations could be colored by the worldview of Western archaeologists whose culture probably differs greatly from that of prehistoric peoples. "Maybe it's telling us more about the people making those interpretations" than the artists who created the images, Dibble says. On the other hand, he says, the repeated use of this image at other sites in the Vezere valley suggests that it was some sort of "shared iconography" that might identify specific groups of people. Indeed, archaeologists have also identified differences in the styles of personal ornaments and other artifacts that might also reflect different groups or tribes, much as people express their group identities by the way they dress today.

Paul Pettit, an archaeologist at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, agrees that the new work "provides admirable independent verification of the age of the Castanet rock art that has been suspected for decades." What's more, argues Pettit, a leader of a small but vocal group of archaeologists who have questioned the dating of the Chauvet paintings, the discovery at Abri Castanet helps make their case that the Chauvet art is too sophisticated to be 37,000 years old. "The only other examples of convincingly dated rock art in this period are the painted block from Fumane, which in terms of technical achievement is similar to the Castanet examples," he says. The reason there are so many stylistic differences between the spectacular Chauvet paintings and the relatively simple engravings at Abri Castanet, he insists, is that the Chauvet images are much younger.

^*All radiocarbon dates in this story are calibrated to account for differences in the amount of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere between prehistoric times and today.

"We keep repeating the same thing over and over," says Suresh about the discussions over how each side would select the most worthy proposals. "Having to start from scratch causes considerable delay, and it is a big waste of time."

So Suresh decided to do something about it. After winning the strong backing of the White House, Suresh this weekend convened a meeting of 47 leaders of research funding agencies from 44 countries. And tomorrow, at the conclusion of closed-door sessions, the group will issue the first-ever global statement on the principles of merit review. Although the actual statement is embargoed until then, it is expected to touch on the importance of using experts in conducting a confidential yet transparent process to identify the highest-quality proposals.

Suresh says he wasn't interested in simply creating another opportunity for senior policymakers to satisfy their yen for travel or one more forum at which they can complain about the perilous state of research funding. "We want something tangible to come out at each meeting," says Suresh. "And it's a virtual organization—there's no secretariat and no bureaucracy. People will come at their own expense. And if it doesn't address a real need, there's no reason for the council to exist."

A draft of the Next Generation Science Standards has been posted by Achieve Inc., a coalition of high-tech companies, foundations, and state and local governments that hope to use their collective influence to create a voluntary national science curriculum where none now exists. The standards, a 2-year effort funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, are built around a novel "framework" for teaching science that blends content with how scientists do their work and its practical applications.

The public has until 1 June to submit comments. A second draft is expected to be issued this fall in hopes of finalizing the document in early 2013. Some 26 states are already involved in writing the standards, which would need to be adopted separately by each state.

See next week's issue of Science for an inside look at the draft standards.

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