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OTTAWA—The Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) appears to have staved off legislation that would have put natural scientists in the province of Ontario under the thumb of professional engineers. A gentleman’s agreement reached between the physicists and the Professional Engineers Ontario late Thursday will compel both sides to negotiate regulations by the end of this month to exempt the research of natural scientists from requiring supervision from engineers.

At issue were revisions to the Professional Engineers Act introduced as part the government of Ontario’s omnibus Open for Business Act 2010. The legislation redefines the “practice of professional engineering” as “any act of planning, designing, composing, evaluating, advising, reporting, directing or supervising that requires the application of engineering principles and concerns the safeguarding of life, health, property, economic interests, the public welfare or the environment, or the managing of any such act.” It defines natural science as any activity “requiring the application of scientific principles, competently performed.”

A broad research coalition has formally weighed in on the stem cell case, urging Chief Judge Royce Lamberth to suspend his injunction last week halting human embryonic stem cell research. Lamberth faces a Tuesday deadline to make his decision after the Department of Justice (DOJ) on 31 August asked for an emergency stay. Late this afternoon, with a long weekend looming, the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research (CAMR), an advocacy group that includes about 100 patient organizations, scientific societies, and foundations, filed an 11-page amicus brief hoping to tip the judge in that direction.

The CAMR brief focuses on two elements it says need to be considered in evaluating the injunction: the public interest in the case and the stay’s impact on patients. The coalition argues that if the judge’s injunction halting the research stands, “the result would be an immediate and devastating impact on ongoing research,” in part because researchers “will have no way to know when such activities may resume.” Because it already takes so long to transform basic scientific findings into actual treatments, the delay “inevitably will harm patients,” the coalition argues.

See our complete coverage of this issue.

British software engineers Nick Barnes and David Jones have spent the past 3 years trying to simplify computer codes used to analyze world temperature records. Today they unveiled a project to broaden their volunteer work, which they hope will make climate change science more transparent.

The project, called the Climate Code Foundation, offers a simplified version of the GISTEMP analysis software used by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. It seeks not only to make individual climate programs like GISTEMP clearer but also to build a movement so that scientists make computer codes more user friendly and open-sourced as part of their normal work, especially in the run-up to the 2013 IPCC report.

“The public’s confidence in climate science is being eroded,” says Jones in a video explaining the project. Although he believes “the science is sound,” he says that “trivial matters like not having access to source codes” may be creating the perception that the science “cannot be trusted.”

Researchers finishing the dig season at Turkey’s Çatalhöyük—a 9500-year-old site famed for its art and symbolism at the dawn of agriculture—got a big shock last week. Stanford University archaeologist Ian Hodder, who has directed excavations since 1993, told the heads of the dig’s specialty labs that they would be asked to step down beginning in 2012, when publication of current work will be completed. It’s “the night of the long knives,” says one long-time team member, who asked not to be identified.

Such a mass dismissal is highly unusual at long-running archaeological excavations. But in a 29 August e-mail to the team explaining his decision, Hodder stressed that he was not dissatisfied with anyone’s work. Rather, the e-mail said, the project “needs new energy—that is, new questions, new theoretical perspectives, ... new methods.”  

Hodder, who began digging at Çatalhöyük to test his new ideas about how archaeology should be done, told ScienceInsider that “it was time for a shake-up” as the dig enters the last decade of his 25-year plan for excavations. “It has been a really remarkable team,” Hodder says. But, “I have felt over recent years that the project was getting comfortable with itself and so not challenging each other or me or the assumptions that we were all taking for granted.”

Many team members, some of whom have been working with the project since the mid-1990s, are stunned and confused. So far, however, they have declined to comment publicly as they must work with Hodder for at least another year. The decision affects the leaders of most of the big labs at the privately funded dig, such as ceramics, stone tools, archaeobotany, animal remains, and human remains. Field excavators, who actually dig up the artifacts for the specialists to study, are not affected.

Hodder says he plans to recruit new lab leaders for the next phase of excavations, planned for 2012–18, although he has not yet spelled out what new questions he intends to pursue.

A new report to President Barack Obama from his science advisers urges the federal government to improve science and math education in U.S. schools by both leading the way and rooting from the sidelines.

Speaking today at a meeting of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), which adopted but didn’t release the report, co-chair Eric Lander said that the country needs many more specialized schools that focus on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). He called for a program that would give special recognition to master STEM teachers--“not the rare award, but maybe 5% of the teacher corps”--so that they could help improve the performance of their colleagues. And he said that the effective use of technology means a lot more than giving schools computers. The fact that the federal government provides only about 8% of total funding for elementary and secondary education, however, means that it must work closely with states to achieve these and other goals, Lander added.

The report, expected out by the end of September, backs most of the Administration’s current strategies to raise student achievement in elementary and secondary schools. But he said a more concerted effort and greater resources are needed. “The federal government hasn’t been organized with a coherent strategy and leadership capacity for K–12 STEM education,” said Lander, director of the Broad Institute of the Masschusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. “There have been many STEM programs started, some of them very good. But they are growing somewhat disconnected from each other. Given the importance of STEM education, and its bipartisan support, it’s essential to bring coherence to that vision.”

Lander said the report applauds the efforts of individual states to adopt common standards in core subjects to ensure that a high school degree represents a similar level of knowledge by students in every state. He also expressed his hope that science will soon follow reading and math as subjects that have been adopted by a growing majority of states that have signed onto the common standards movement.

But a solid preparation in STEM areas isn’t the only thing that students should expect from their education, he added. “Inspiration is also needed, at all levels, and we have to make sure that every element of our educational system is set up to both prepare and inspire.” Those twin missions are highlighted in the title of the report, Prepare and Inspire: STEM Education for America’s Future.

The report reflects the consensus of a year-long discussion among some 20 experts both within and outside PCAST, explained the panel’s co-chair, University of Maryland physicist James Gates. It’s the first of two reports on STEM education. The second, dealing with STEM in higher education, has yet to get under way.

PCAST’s work on K–12 STEM education is not done, however. “We expect to meet with the Department of Education and the National Science Foundation in the next 6 to 12 months” to see how PCAST can help those and other federal agencies to implement the report, Lander said. “We want to stay on top of this.”

The Brazilian government says that a preliminary survey by a low-resolution satellite shows that deforestation in the Amazon declined by 47.5% over the past 12 months. The figure is the largest decline since measurements began in 1988 and, if confirmed by data from a second set of satellites due out later this year, would amount to nearly a 90% drop in lost forest area since a 2004 peak.

“I think the results are pretty strong for a big additional decrease in deforestation,” says Greg Asner, a satellite expert with the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University. “I am really pleased to see it. I do not doubt that the trend is real.”

The Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE), Brazil’s remote-sensing agency, said fires burned 2296 sq km between August 2009 and August 2010. That compares with 4375 sq km for the preceding 12-month period. Clearing was concentrated in the agricultural states of Pará and Mato Grosso. Asner, who uses satellites to monitor tropical forests globally, says Brazil is the only tropical country where deforestation rates are decreasing consistently. Deforestation refers to land cleared by fires for pastures or farms. The satellites do not monitor another activity, illegal logging, that also can degrade forest regions.

Four NASA experts arrived today in the Chilean town of Copiapó to use expertise from space missions to help 33 miners trapped in a chamber 700 meters beneath the surface since 5 August. Chilean officials say it may take 4 months to free the men and have sought advice from submarine commanders as well as Chilean survivors of a famous 1972 Andes plane crash. The NASA group, which will remain at the mine until Saturday, is led by NASA's deputy chief medical officer, Michael Duncan, and includes space health expert Albert Willard Holland, head of space medicine James Davis Polk, and engineer Clint Cragg. At a news conference in Santiago (audio available via the U.S. Embassy in Santiago), Duncan said it was imperative to increase the amount of calories reaching the miners and get them on a regular sleep schedule. "The environment may be different, but the human response in physiology, behavior, responses to emergencies is quite similar," said Duncan.

In July, NASA published a detailed study of long-duration space operations that advised crew members to keep journals, prepare special meals, and “distribute tedious and housekeeping tasks as evenly as possible among the crew.”

Catherine DeAngelis, the outspoken editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, is stepping down after a 10-year tenure.  DeAngelis, who was also the first female editor of the journal and trained as a pediatrician, said in a press release that “all good things must come to an end,” and she’ll be moving to Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. 

For many years, academic institutions and businesses in the United States have complained about the long list of technologies that the U.S. government considers too sensitive to export without a license. It affects companies directly by curtailing their ability to freely sell certain products like sensors with military applications all over the world. But the list also affects universities in that it puts restrictions on hiring foreign students for research projects requiring the use of these technologies.

On Tuesday, President Barack Obama delivered good news to both companies and universities: the Administration plans to pare down the list of export-controlled items and improve coordination between the different agencies responsible for granting export licenses. The new list will be tiered by risk, a concept that the Administration is applying, in parallel, to the safekeeping of dangerous pathogens. A significant percentage of items are likely to be removed from lists altogether. The president also announced that he would sign an executive order creating an Export Enforcement Coordination Center to reduce red tape in enforcing export controls.

“Going forward, we will have a single, tiered, positive list—one which will allow us to build higher walls around the export of our most sensitive items while allowing the export of less critical ones under less restrictive conditions,” Obama said in a videotaped statement released Tuesday.

The only particle physics lab in the United States should get another chance to beat its European rival to the discovery of the most coveted particle in high-energy physics—even if it means delaying other projects at the lab, an independent committee of researchers says. But that recommendation doesn’t sit well with Pier Oddone, the director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. Oddone might be forced to choose among his “children” if the lab doesn’t receive any more money to continue running its 25-year-old atom smasher, the Tevatron collider, through 2014 instead of turning it off as planned in September 2011.

 The extra running time should enable Fermilab researchers to glimpse the long sought Higgs boson—the lynchpin to physicists’ explanation of how all particles get their mass—before colleagues at the European particle physics lab, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, can nail it with the newer, more powerful Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Had the recommendation been to stop, the Tevatron would surely shut down next year.

Warning of a "devastating impact" on ongoing research, government lawyers this afternoon asked a federal court to stay a preliminary injunction that last week forced the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to suspend future grant payments to study human embryonic stem cells (hESC) and shut down its in-house research on hESCs.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a 23-page memorandum in support of an emergency motion to stay the injunction pending an appeal with the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, whose chief judge, Royce Lamberth, issued the stunning 23 August ruling. DOJ argues that the injunction should be stayed "to avoid terminating research projects midstream, invalidating results in process, and impeding or negating years of scientific progress toward finding new treatments" for diseases such as diabetes and spinal cord injuries.

The motion calls the judge’s order to stop funds "sweeping," noting it covers research that began in 2002 during the Bush Administration. DOJ says this is "causing irrevocable harm" to millions of patients who could benefit from hESC research, NIH, hundreds of scientists, and taxpayers who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on hESC research. It is already having "disastrous consequences" for $9.5 million in NIH intramural research on hESCs, which the agency began shutting down yesterday, DOJ states.

TOKYO—Funding to complete a controversial supercomputer, plan a second Hayabusa asteroid sample retrieval mission, and dramatically expand research into induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells is on the agenda of Japan's Ministry of Education for the fiscal year that begins next April. Getting what it wants will require clearing some political and bureaucratic hurdles.

Tatsuo Kawabata, the education minister, unveiled the requested budget late yesterday here, saying that the "extremely severe financial situation" had restricted the ministry's hand. But it is still asking for an overall 4% increase in research spending to $21 billion. The biggest increases go toward fields identified as priorities by the ruling Democratic Party, of which Kawabata is a member in Japan's parliament. These areas are life sciences, including iPS cell—related research and neuroscience; green technologies; and the development of human resources, which the ministry hopes to turn into more scholarships and increased support for young researchers.

Last month, one of Australia’s leading biomedical centers, the Queensland Institute of Medical Research (QIMR) in Brisbane, announced it had enticed Frank Gannon to step down from running the funding agency Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and become its next director in 2011. This week’s issue of Science will have an interview with Gannon about his views on research in Ireland and Europe and why he’s making the unexpected move.

QIMR was successful in luring Gannon in part because he was already familiar with Brisbane; he is on the board of another science facility there, and his daughter had gone to the city for a graduate degree. Gannon sees some parallels between Ireland and the Australian state of Queensland. Although both areas have a reputation for natural beauty that drives a tourism economy, each now hopes to generate jobs and tax revenue through investments in research and technological development. Gannon notes that Queensland, commonly known as “the sunshine state,” has even recently adopted a new logo: the smart state.

A county circuit court judge today quashed a subpoena issued by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli that sought documents related to work by climate scientist Michael Mann, according to The Washington Post. Mann, now at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, was on the faculty of the University of Virginia until 2005, and Cuccinelli is investigating whether Mann had committed fraud in the course of applying for grants related to his global warming research. Judge Paul Peatross Jr. of Albemarle County Circuit Court found that Cuccinelli had given no reason to suspect that Mann had committed any fraud, one of the requirements of a state law that Cuccinelli used as the basis for his case.

Mann issued a statement saying the judge’s ruling “is a victory not just for me and the university, but for all scientists who live in fear that they may be subject to a politically-motivated witch hunt when their research findings prove inconvenient to powerful vested interests.”

A new review of the procedures of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gives the influential science organization a solid B+ for its 2 decades of assessments of the global climate system. But a panel assembled by the InterAcademy Council, which is made up of science academies from around the world, says that there are plenty of areas in which IPCC could do better. Its 113-page report, issued today, calls for a new leadership structure with shorter terms, tighter review procedures, and better lines of communication.

One significant change would create a full-time executive director position to run the day-to-day operations of the group, along with an executive committee to make crucial decisions quickly. The key decision-makers should serve a single, roughly 6-year term, says the report of a 12-member panel chaired by Harold Shapiro, president emeritus of Princeton University. Indian engineer Rajendra Pachauri has served as the half-time chair of the informally organized body for the past 9 years. Speaking at a press conference in New York City, however, Pachauri gave no indication that he was prepared to hand over the reins.

Responding to a court order issued a week ago, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) this morning ordered intramural researchers studying human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) to shut down their experiments.

NIH's action—probably unprecedented in its history—is a response to a preliminary injunction on 23 August from U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth. The judge ruled that the Obama policy allowing NIH funding to be used to study hESC lines violates a law prohibiting the use of federal funds to destroy embryos.

According to a furious NIH staffer who read the e-mail to ScienceInsider over the telephone, this morning's message from NIH intramural research chief Michael Gottesman states: "HHS [the Department of Health and Human Services] has determined that the recent preliminary injunction ... is applicable to the use of human embryonic stem cells in intramural research projects. In light of this determination, effective today, intramural scientists who use human ES cell lines should initiate procedures to terminate these projects. Procedures that will conserve and protect the research resources should be followed."

The agency has eight research projects that use hESCs, most if not all of which use lines approved under the Bush Administration, say NIH officials. It also has a unit that characterizes lines added to the NIH registry of approved hESC lines.

The shutdown is the first immediate halt to research since Lamberth issued the preliminary injunction. NIH Director Francis Collins has said that extramural researchers can continue their projects for now and that the injunction will affect only future grant payments. ("Intramural" means researchers in labs on the NIH campus; "extramural" refers to researchers at universities and other outside institutions who receive NIH grants.)But some biomedical research lobbyists worry that that interpretation of the ruling may have been too optimistic, and a shutdown of all ongoing NIH-funded hESC research could be imminent.

The Department of Justice is expected to ask the courts to stay the injunction as soon as today, an NIH source tells ScienceInsider. 

UPDATE, 30 August, 1:41 p.m.:

Below is the full text of the e-mail that an NIH staffer told ScienceInsider that he received this morning. "Today" actually refers to last Friday, 27 August.

HHS has determined that the recent preliminary injunction ordered by the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in the matter of Sherley v. Sebelius is applicable to the use of human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) in intramural research projects. In light of this determination, effective today August 27, 2010, all intramural scientists who use hESC lines should initiate procedures to terminate these projects. Procedures that will conserve and protect the research resources should be followed.

All intramural Principal Investigators using hESCs should succinctly describe what research will be terminated, provide the parent annual report number (if the project is associated with one from FY 2009 or before), and describe any alternate use of funds that will become available as a result of this action. This information should be sent to the IC SD and a copy should be sent to Dr. Michael Gottesman, Deputy Director for Intramural Research.

Please contact me if you have questions.

Michael Gottesman, M.D.

Deputy Director for Intramural Research, NIH

See our complete coverage of this issue.

The InterAcademy Council, a coalition of world science academies, has released a 113-page review of the management of the world's most prominent climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. ScienceInsider's Eli Kintisch is blogging live about the rollout of the report at the United Nations on his twitter feed, @elikint.

China's self-appointed science fraud buster was assaulted yesterday afternoon in Beijing. Fang Shimin, better known by his pen name Fang Zhouzhi, has used his Web site New Threads and his microblog to expose scientific misconduct, debunk crackpot medicine and pseudoscience claims, and catch cheaters who falsify resumes with fake degrees and nonexistent publications.

Fang has been slammed with libel suits contesting his often-acerbic exposés. But yesterday's attack—if it was linked to his antifraud crusade—takes things to a new level. According to Fang's account posted on New Threads, he came out of a teahouse near his apartment complex around 5 p.m. on Sunday with two TV journalists who had interviewed him about Li Yi, a Daoist abbot who has claimed to have performed supernatural feats. After Fang saw the journalists into a taxi, a man walked up and sprayed something in his face. When Fang ran across the street, a second man chased him with an iron hammer and threw it at his head. Fang dodged the hammer. The man picked it up and threw it again, hitting and bruising Fang in the back. After Fang ran into his apartment complex, the two men left and he called the police. As Science went to press, Fang had not responded to a request for comment, and the unidentified assailants remained at large. Beijing's police department confirms it has opened an investigation.

The incident has a disturbing precedent. In June, two men tried to kill science journalist Fang Xuanchang of the Chinese magazine Caijing. Fang Xuanchang is not related to Fang Zhouzi, but the two are friends and renowned for muckraking the seamy underside of Chinese science. The attack on Fang Xuanchang remains unsolved.

A New York City public interest group yesterday challenged eight patents on the widely used HIV/AIDS drug ritonavir, a protease inhibitor. It wants the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to hold a formal reexamination of a string of awards made between 1996 and 2008.  

The Public Patent Foundation (PubPat) claims that ritonavir’s maker, Abbott Laboratories of Abbott Park, Illinois, is attempting to maintain an improper monopoly. In extensive documents filed on 26 August, PubPat asks the Patent Office to declare the patents invalid because they fail to describe a new invention and are “causing significant public harm.” The ritonavir patents, PubPat says, inflate the cost of therapy for HIV/AIDS patients and restrict research on related drug possibilities.

PubPat’s director, Daniel Ravicher, argues that “fairness” is the issue. One of Abbott’s central patents (5,541,206), granted in 1996, is substantially the same as a patent the company received in 1992, according to Ravicher. That earlier one (5,142,056) expired in August 2009. Ravicher doesn’t dispute the original invention. But he says it is “greedy” to extend the patent on retonavir beyond the statutory limit of 17 years with slight formula modifications. PubPat makes similar arguments against all eight ritonavir patents. Ravicher also argues that they lack originality because the science in them was discussed in print before the patents were applied for. (PubPat is the same group that persuaded a New York federal court in March to invalidate Myriad Genetics’s patents on breast cancer genes.)

Abbott has been challenged before over HIV/AIDS therapy. PubPat points out that a group of consumers sued the company and tried to overturn its patents on a ritonavir product (Norvir) in 2003 after Abbott raised the price, boosting the cost to a patient from roughly $1.71 a day to $8.57 a day. Abbott fought the suit for years but agreed to settle in 2008, promising to distribute $10 million to patient support groups.

Abbott spokesperson Scott Stoffel said, “We're confident in the validity of our patents and expect they will be upheld.”

Evidence of bad behavior by Harvard University cognitive scientist Marc Hauser continues to mount. Today Gerry Altmann, the editor of the journal Cognition, posted a statement on his blog saying that his review of information provided to him by Harvard has convinced him that fabrication is the most plausible explanation for data in a 2002 Cognition paper. The journal had already planned to retract the paper.

The paper in question addressed whether monkeys can learn to distinguish abstract rules underlying patterns of syllables played through a loudspeaker. The paper's conclusion that cotton-top tamarins can learn these types of rules surprised some researchers, who believed that this was a uniquely human talent related to our ability to learn language. The findings fit with a broader theme in Hauser's work: that the cognitive gap between humans and monkeys is not as great as widely supposed.

Altmann writes on his blog that the Harvard investigators reviewed videotapes of the experiments and found no evidence that a key experimental condition reported in the paper had ever been run:

Given that there is no evidence that the data, as reported, were in fact collected …, and given that the reported data were subjected to statistical analyses to show how they supported the paper's conclusions, I am forced to conclude that there was most likely an intention here, using data that appear to have been fabricated, to deceive the field into believing something for which there was in fact no evidence at all.

Altmann writes that there may yet be an alternative explanation for the discrepancy between the videotapes and what's reported in the paper. But he can’t imagine what it might be, adding, "I know that the investigation was rigorous to the extreme."

For more on the Hauser case, see this summary from last week's Science and a more recent rundown of the remaining questions.