ScienceInsider

Bruce Kendall says he's proud to call himself "a Jesus man." For the past 36 years he's also been a high school science teacher at Mt. Vernon High School just outside of Indianapolis.

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."

PARIS—French Prime Minister François Fillon today announced that five more conglomerates of universities and other institutes will receive a massive capital injection aimed at catapulting them into the international academic elite. The announcement brings to eight the total number of winners in the investment scheme, which aims to boost France's dismal performance in the Shanghai ranking and other academic hit parades.

The five new winners in the Excellence Initiative (Idex) are Aix-Marseille, Paris-Saclay, Sorbonne Université, Sorbonne Paris Cité, and Toulouse. They join Bordeaux, Strasbourg, and Paris Sciences et Lettres, which were selected last July in the first stage of the flagship project.

Legislators in Indiana appear to have fallen short of their goal of injecting creationism into U.S. public schools, at least for this year. However, they did deploy a few new tactics in the never-ending assault on evolutionary theory by religious fundamentalists.

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.

Happy landings. New FAA reauthorization bill includes funding for programs on new air traffic control systems.

Credit: Federal Aviation Administration

After years of controversy and more than 20 extensions of the current law, Congress is poised to pass a 4-year reauthorization of programs at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The bill, which could come up for a vote as early as this week, would provide up to $16 billion a year for a wide range of airline-related activities.

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.

Russian space scientists this week floated the idea of building a new version of the Phobos-Grunt sample return spacecraft after the first model failed to escape Earth orbit and crashed in the Pacific on 15 January. But according to the head of the RussianFederal Space Agency (Roscosmos), Vladimir Popovkin, a new mission will depend on the outcome of talks with the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA about the possible inclusion of Russia in the ExoMars project, which plans to send missions to the red planet in 2016 and 2018.

Phobos-Grunt, Russia's most ambitious planetary probe in decades, was launched on 9 November with the aim of depositing a lander on Mars' moon Phobos and bringing back samples to Earth. It also carried a Chinese-made Mars orbiter, that country's first interplanetary probe. Although the spacecraft was lifted into Earth orbit faultlessly, it then failed to respond to commands from the ground and did not ignite its booster rockets which would set it on course for Phobos. Despite desperate attempts to reestablish contact by Roscosmos and ESA, the craft remained mute and its orbit degraded until the spacecraft plummeted into the ocean off southern Chile.

Queries. Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) has asked FDA to explain why it monitored the computers of whistleblowers.

Credit: U.S. Senate

The integrity of the scientific review process appears to be at the heart of recent allegations that Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials spied electronically on whistleblowers—including scientists, an engineer, and a statistician—trying to expose alleged flaws in the agency's approval process for cancer-screening devices.

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 debate over whether a bacterium can incorporate arsenic into its DNA just flared up again, with the posting yesterday of a paper refuting the idea on ArXiv, an electronic preprint archive primarily used by astronomers, mathematicians, and physicists. The controversy began in December 2010, when NASA astrobiology fellow Felisa Wolfe-Simon and colleagues described online in Science a microbe called GFAJ-1, which grew, albeit slowly, in the presence of arsenic, leading the authors to conclude the bacterium had taken up the toxic element and incorporated it into its cellular components. The report, amplified by a NASA press conference, quickly lit up the blogosphere and Twitter and led to the unprecedented publication of eight critical technical comments alongside the print version of the paper.

Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues agreed to make samples of GFAJ-1 available and now one vocal critic, Rosemary Redfield, a microbiologist at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in Canada, has grown the bacterium in the presence of arsenic and found no evidence of its uptake in the microbe's genetic material. "The data they have supports the conclusion there is no arsenic in the DNA," comments Michael Bartlett, a chemist at the University of Georgia, Athens, who is an expert in mass spectrometry of DNA, RNA, and related molecules.

Redfield, who chronicled every twist and turn of her experiments on her blog, and some other critics of the original paper are satisfied this resolves the matter and do not plan follow-up experiments. "We can do fancier analyses that push the limits of detection down, but I think the burden of proof is back on the authors," she says. "They are going to have to provide some better data than they did in their paper."

But Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues say the work on arsenic-based life is just beginning. They told ScienceInsider that they will not comment on the details of Redfield's work until it has been peer reviewed and published. They emphasize that the key point of their paper was that the microbe was able to use arsenic to grow, despite its toxicity, and that they only suggested arsenic was in the DNA. "What this is about is refuting an extreme interpretation of the paper," says John Tainer, a biochemist who was not an author on the original paper but is now working with Wolfe-Simon at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. "I would call it more of an attack than a paper. It aims to shut the door on additional research."

Physics home. Universidade Estadual Paulista in São Paulo will house an international center for theory.

Credit: Courtesy of UNESP

SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL—A new center for theoretical physics opens in Brazil next week, with the goal of becoming a South American hub for the field. Named the ICTP South American Institute for Fundamental Research, it is the joint project of the U.N.-affiliated Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy, the Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP) in São Paulo, and the São Paulo Research Funding Agency.

"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.

How long before the world starts running short of oil? Have we hit the peak of oil production already, or do we have until mid-century? This week on ScienceLive, we’ll chat with two experts on oil as a critical energy source. They’ll answer your questions on a variety of pressing questions, including whether hot new technology can boost world production, how the United States might reduce its dependence on foreign oil, and the biggie, how much breathing room we have before the inevitable peak.

Join Mark Finley, the General Manager of Global Energy Markets and US Economics at BP, and Davie Greene, a Corporate Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a Senior Fellow of the Howard H. Baker, Jr. Center for Public Policy at the University of Tennessee as they tackle these questions and take yours, live at 3 p.m. EST Thursday.

You can submit your questions on the chat page before the chat starts or at any time during the live Q&A.

A movement to boycott scientific publishing giant Elsevier because of the high price of its journals is rapidly gathering steam. Nine days after it started, more than 2600 scientists—including several Fields medalists—have signed a petition at thecostofknowledge.com in which they pledge not to publish papers in Elsevier's journals, nor referee other researchers' studies, or do other types of editorial work for the company.

The petition, which has created a buzz on researchers' blogs and Twitter, isn't just an attack on Elsevier, its organizers say, but also an attempt to show the scientific community that it can help change the publishing business themselves to increase access to their studies.

Stephen J. O'Brien

Credit: NCI/University of Delaware

Stephen J. O'Brien, has left the National Cancer Institute's (NCI's) Laboratory of Genomic Diversity after 25 years as its head to help jump-start genome bioinformatics at St. Petersburg University in Russia. Last fall, O'Brien was awarded a 3-year, $5 million "megagrant" from the Russian Ministry of Education and Science, a program started in 2010 to boost Russian science by attracting big-name researchers to work at least part-time in that country. Though a cancer institute researcher, O'Brien had also concentrated on comparative genetic studies to understand the evolution and conservation of mammals. In 2009, he and two others started the Genome 10K project, a call for the sequencing of 10,000 vertebrates. However, NCI was becoming ever less supportive of nonhuman research and "the list of things they didn't want me to do was longer than the list of things they wanted me to," says O'Brien. He says he knew his work with the Genome 10K project would be limited and that he wouldn't be able to accept the megagrant while still working for NCI. So last month, he retired from NCI.

The megagrants program has gotten mixed reviews. Yet O'Brien says he is making headway setting up the new center, to be named after a famous Russian evolutionary biologist, Theodosius Dobzhansky. Over the next 3 years, O'Brien will spend at least 4 months per year in Russia working at the center, which is due to open in May. "I'm very excited about the prospects for the future," he says.

Big fan. Newt Gingrich has been talking up science on the campaign trail, but he's had a rocky relationship with the scientific community.

Credit: Newt 2012

It's safe to say that only one leading presidential contender has ever boasted of debating Tyrannosaurus Rex's eating habits with a leading paleontologist, of reading Science and Nature while serving in the House of Representatives, and of discussing brain science with some of the leading lights of that field. Indeed, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich—who faces a make-or-break vote tomorrow in Florida's Republican presidential primary -- may be the best informed and most outspoken science booster to make a serious run for the White House since Vice President Al Gore talked up climate change and computing research during his ultimately unsuccessful 2000 campaign.

Just because Gingrich loves science, however, doesn't mean that researchers and science policy wonks necessarily love Gingrich.

Indeed, Gingrich has a long and complicated relationship with the science community marked by equal measures of flattered delight and bewildered anxiety.

Former business partners of Harvey Whittemore filed a civil suit against him and his wife Annette in Nevada court on 27 January, alleging that the couple inappropriately used the resources of a holding company Harvey co-owned, Wingfield Nevada Group, to support a scientific research institute they founded as well as many personal expenses. In documents filed with Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nevada, the suit charges that the couple inappropriately spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to support their Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease (WPI) in Reno and its staff salaries, private air flights, and fundraising efforts. "These allegations are false," the Whittemores said in a statement. "We will take any and all steps necessary to preserve the reputation for integrity that we have built in this state for over 40 years."

WPI has been embroiled in controversy since October 2009 when its researchers led a study published in Science that linked chronic fatigue syndrome to a mouse retrovirus. WPI fired its head researcher, Judy Mikovits, in September 2011 for insubordination and later filed suit against her for allegedly misappropriating laboratory notebooks and other proprietary information. Mikovits later was arrested and jailed in a related criminal case for the alleged theft of these materials.

Fiterman Hall, a new classroom and lab complex, will be part of CUNY's Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Credit: CUNY/The City University of New York

To succeed, any effort to improve U.S. undergraduate science instruction and attract more minorities into the field must extend beyond the tiny fraction of students educated at the country's elite colleges. In other words, those reforms also need to be embraced by institutions like The City University of New York (CUNY), which serves more than 400,000 students, many from low-income and minority families. But a new core curriculum at CUNY takes a big step in the wrong direction, say some science faculty members, by making it less likely that its graduates will be exposed to hands-on laboratory coursework.

"President Obama is saying that our students need to take more science, and CUNY is saying that it's not necessary," says David Lieberman, chair of the physics department at CUNY's Queensborough Community College and one of several faculty members unhappy about the changes. "It's absurd."

CUNY is the quintessential urban university. A confederation of seven community colleges and 11 senior colleges scattered across all five boroughs, CUNY educates 155,000 full-time students. In addition, up to 270,000 students are taking one or more courses outside a formal degree program.

Bruce Darling

Credit: Courtesy of the National Academies

A jack-of-all-trades in the U.S. science policy arena, Bruce Darling says that becoming executive officer of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) will put him right exactly where he wants to be: in the middle of a "problem-rich environment" at an institution with the talent and resources to make a difference.

Darling, now vice president for laboratory management at the University of California (UC), was named today to the job of overseeing day-to-day operations at NAS and its operating arm, the National Research Council. He replaces William Colglazier, who last fall became science and technology adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. NRC employs 1100 people and has an operating budget of about $300 million.

Aviv Regev

Credit: Broad Institute

The Broad Institute has been showered with $32.5 million from a philanthropist to take on one of the biggest challenges in biology: mapping the molecular circuitry inside mammalian cells. The Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will create what it's calling a cell observatory that brings together biologists from the institute and elsewhere to tackle this problem, akin to how astronomers gather at telescope observatories to collect and analyze data.

The gift announced yesterday comes from the Klarman Family Foundation, a Boston charity founded by financier Seth Klarman, who sits on the Broad's board, and his wife Beth. The Broad will use the money to build on efforts by systems biologists to map how genes, RNA, proteins, and other biomolecules interact in pathways to make cells function in healthy people and in disease. "It is a substantial challenge but it is one in which groups around the world have been making a lot of progress in the past few years," partly thanks to new tools for shutting off genes and analyzing gene-protein interactions, says Broad computational biologist Aviv Regev, who will head the observatory.

Nuclear plant designer Masashi Goto (left) and materials scientist Hiromitsu Ino (right) have raised questions about plans to restart two reactors.

Credit: Dennis Normile

TOKYO—Japan is preparing for the possibility of a summer without nuclear power as utilities and safety experts squabble over the safety of the country's remaining reactors. And a key government minister is calling the power industry's bluff—that blackouts will occur if plants idled for inspection are not brought online—by saying the nation could avoid disruption by relying on conservation and thermal power.

By law, nuclear power plants must be periodically shut down for maintenance and inspection; utilities need national and local permission to restart operations. In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, last summer the governing Democratic Party of Japan required "stress tests," analyses of a facility's ability to withstand natural disasters, to be part of the periodic inspection routine. That analysis was carried out for two reactors at a plant in Ohi on the Japan Sea coast and submitted for review to Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), which concluded they had passed. Operator Kansai Electric Power is seeking approval to restart the two reactors.

But today two members of a NISA advisory committee called the stress tests flawed and "not proof of safety." At a press conference, Hiromitsu Ino, a materials scientist and professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo, and Masashi Goto, a former nuclear power plant designer, said their concerns were simply ignored in the final report.

The former head of Italy's civil protection department, Guido Bertolaso, is to be investigated for manslaughter alongside seven scientists and technicians who are currently on trial for allegedly having carried out a superficial seismic risk analysis and giving a false sense of security to people in the central Italian town of L'Aquila only days before a deadly earthquake struck and killed 308 people.

Bertolaso was implicated by a recording of a phone conversation between himself and a regional civil protection officer that took place a week before the earthquake. In it Bertolaso explains that the experts were to meet up "not because we are frightened and worried" by a series of tremors that had been striking the region for several months but because "we want to reassure the public." The prosecution alleges that it was unjustified reassurances provided by the seven who, it is argued, underestimated the threat of a major quake, which caused many people in L'Aquila and the surrounding area to remain indoors and perish in the early hours of 6 April 2009 rather than go outside.

Bill Gates announced yesterday that between now and 2016, his foundation will pump $750 million into the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Gates, who made the announcement at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, noted that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has already committed $650 million to the Global Fund, making it the largest nongovernmental donor. "I am confident that this is one of the most effective ways we invest our money every year, and I always urge other funders to join us in getting so much bang for our buck," wrote Gates in a letter he released on the eve of the Davos forum. Donor countries have paid $20.7 billion to date and pledged $8.2 billion more.

Commercial fishing operations get most of the blame for overfishing, but they're not the only player. Recreational anglers can also have a big impact on fish populations by dint of their numbers: An estimated 11 million anglers took some 73 million saltwater fishing trips in the United States in 2010. How many fish they catch, however, has been somewhat uncertain.

Today the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that it has finished an "ambitious overhaul" of its methods for estimating the impact of recreational fishing. A more accurate count will allow the managers to improve their regulation of fisheries.