President Barack Obama nominated Moniz on 4 March. But despite receiving bipartisan support, Moniz had to wait 2 months for Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to lift a "hold" on his candidacy.
Graham was upset because the Obama administration's 2014 budget request called for a study of alternatives to the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, under construction at DOE's Savannah River Site in Aiken, South Carolina. The plant is supposed to convert plutonium from weapons into fuel for nuclear power plants, but the study triggered fears that DOE wanted to pull the plug on the project, whose cost has ballooned from $4.9 billion to $7.7 billion. This week, Graham agreed to let the vote on Moniz go forward, although he warned that he might still hold up votes on lower level DOE appointments, according to a report in Environment & Energy Daily. Graham joined in on the unanimous approval for Moniz.
"My Senate colleagues recognize that Dr. Moniz is smart, he is savvy about how the Department of Energy operates because he has been there before, and he has a proven track record of collaboration, which is just what you need when you're leading the Department of Energy," said Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, shortly after the vote.
Back at MIT, Robert Armstrong, a chemical engineer, will replace Moniz as director of the MIT Energy Initiative. Armstrong had been Moniz's deputy. That announcement came just minutes after the Senate vote.
]]> ]]>Journal impact factors, calculated by the company Thomson Reuters, were first developed in the 1950s to help libraries decide which journals to order. Yet, impact factors are now widely used to assess the performance of individuals and research institutions. The metric "has become an obsession" that "warp[s] the way that research is conducted, reported, and funded," said a group of scientists organized by the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) in a press release. Particularly in China and India, they say, postdocs think that they should try to publish their work in only journals with high impact factors.
The problem, the scientists say, is that the impact factor is flawed. For example, it doesn't distinguish primary research from reviews; it can be skewed by a few highly cited papers; and it dissuades journals from publishing papers in fields such as ecology that are cited less often than, say, biomedical studies.
]]> In what they've dubbed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)—a document drafted last December at the annual ASCB meeting and posted online today—the scientists write: "It is … imperative that scientific output is measured accurately and evaluated wisely." Their 18 recommendations urge the research community to "eliminate" the use of journal impact factors in funding, hiring, and promotion decisions.Signatories include Science Editor-in-Chief Bruce Alberts (see his editorial); AAAS, Science's publisher; dozens of other editors, journals, and societies; as well as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Wellcome Trust, which are major research charities.
"I see this as an insurrection. We don't want to be at the mercy of this anymore," says ASCB Executive Director Stefano Bertuzzi. He adds that the scientists aren't criticizing Thomson Reuters. "We're not attacking them in any way," he says. Instead, the resolution puts the blame on the research community for "the misuse of impact factors."
Bertuzzi says that his group realizes they won't change things overnight: "I see this as the beginning of a conversation." Still, he says, there are already signs of change.
For example, National Cancer Institute Director Harold Varmus is planning a pilot test that will ask researchers submitting biosketches with their grant proposals to describe their most important work instead of simply listing their key papers. Varmus said recently that he wants researchers to stop thinking that they must publish in only "certain hyper-prestigious journals." (In a similar move, the National Science Foundation recently changed its biosketch guidelines to emphasize "products" such as data sets, not just papers.)
Thomson Reuters did not respond to a request for comment.
*Update, 11:05 a.m., 17 May:
Thomson Reuters responded to the DORA in this statement, agreeing that: "No one metric can fully capture the complex contributions scholars make to their disciplines, and many forms of scholarly achievement should be considered." The company notes that the impact factor "is singled-out in the Declaration not for how it is calculated, but for how it is used."
]]>In a letter to Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), NSF defended the need to preserve the confidentiality of the peer-review process, according to sources with knowledge of the letter's contents. The letter explains how NSF's process works and that the independent reviewers recruited by the agency are promised anonymity in return for offering their candid comments on the quality of the proposal. After taking that hard line, however, acting NSF Director Cora Marrett proposed to brief the committee on how NSF selects from among some 40,000 research proposals that it receives each year. NSF also offered to provide general information on how the five grants satisfy NSF's mission to expand the frontiers of science.
In a statement, Smith tells ScienceInsider, "I am disappointed the NSF declined to provide Congress with additional information that would show why they are spending taxpayer dollars on specific research grants." A committee aide says that, earlier this year, NSF officials told the committee to submit a letter describing the information it was seeking and that today's NSF response "is at variance with that conversation."
]]> At the same time, the aide sees NSF's letter as a temporary bump on the road to obtaining the reviewer comments. "We are working through the problem," says the aide. The next step, according to the staffer, is a meeting at which NSF officials will clarify "what they can provide us. … The ball is in NSF's court."In March, Congress blocked NSF from funding any political science research this year unless it served to promote national security or economic development. Last month Smith drafted a bill that, in effect, would apply such a test to NSF's entire research portfolio.
On 25 April, Smith also wrote to Marrett asking for "access to the scientific/technical reviews and the Program Officers Review Analysis for the following [five] research projects that have been awarded NSF funding." Both his letter and his draft bill have inflamed the scientific community, which has urged him to rescind his request for information and abandon any legislation aimed at altering peer review at NSF. NSF's reply today is in response to Smith's letter, which requested the information by 10 May.
The committee is not interested in the identities of the reviewers, according to the aide, but rather in understanding how NSF justifies spending taxpayer dollars on these five specific grants. "I have worked with redacted statements before," the aide says. "It's such a small percentage of the overall content." The aide said a phrase from Marrett's letter, to wit, "I hope that there may be another way," was a sign of NSF's willingness to satisfy the chairman's request.
But that phrase may not mean the same thing to NSF officials. In their minds, confidentiality is a bedrock principle of the peer-review process that goes beyond the identity of reviewers. They believe that the comments themselves need to be protected in order for the system to work properly. Accordingly, the proper response to Smith's request is to explain how grant proposals are reviewed and how the best are funded without reference to specific reviewer comments. Any more details, they feel, would undermine the peer-review process.
]]>Launched in 2009, the Kepler mission completed its 3.5-year planned run last year, winning plaudits from planetary scientists. The spacecraft monitors some 150,000 sunlike stars in search of transiting planets. In November 2012, the mission began an extension of an additional 3.5 years, and officials were hopeful that it would continue beaming back data until 2016.
That now looks uncertain following the failure of the second of its four reaction wheels, officials announced at a telecom this afternoon. One of the wheels failed last year, and the spacecraft needs three reaction wheels to be pointed precisely. Mission managers learned of the latest failure earlier this week.
]]> Engineers must either regain functionality of one of the two broken wheels or find another way of pointing the spacecraft as desired. "We are not down and out," says Charles Sobeck, deputy project manager for Kepler at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. "The spacecraft is safe and stable. We'll proceed with our investigation."Sobeck says that "the mission itself has been spectacularly successful. We have lots of data on the ground still to pore through. The next question is going to be what the future of the mission looks like."
]]>As ScienceInsider reported last week, the group, part of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, hopes to end confusion about the name of the virus. It was initially called human coronavirus-EMC in a paper by its discoverer, Egyptian microbiologist Ali M. Zaki, and Ron Fouchier of Erasmus MC in the Netherlands, enlisted by Zaki to help characterize the virus. Since then, a plethora of other names has been used. The paper's authors write:
]]>After careful consideration and broad consultation, the CSG has decided to call the new coronavirus "Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus" (MERS-CoV). This name is endorsed by the discoverers of the virus and other researchers that pioneered MERS-CoV studies, by the World Health Organization and by the Saudi Ministry of Health. We strongly recommend the use of this name in scientific and other communications.
Apart from the nine members of the Coronavirus Study Group, the authors include Zaki, Fouchier, Saudi Deputy Minister for Public Health Ziad Memish, Caroline Brown of the World Health Organization's (WHO's) European office in Copenhagen, and Maria Zambon of the U.K. Health Protection Agency, who identified the second known coronavirus case in September.
Geographical names are often controversial because they can be seen as stigmatizing, but CSG chair Raoul de Groot of Utrecht University in the Netherlands says that the reference to the Middle East was eventually acceptable to all. He hopes that the paper will end the debate. "It's good for communication that the field has found a name that is supported by many," De Groot writes in an -email to ScienceInsider. "At the moment, there are more important issues with regard to MERS and MERS-CoV to focus on."
Today, WHO reported two new MERS cases in Saudi Arabia, part of a cluster linked to a hospital in the country's Eastern Province that now numbers 21 cases. Worldwide, there have been 40 confirmed cases, WHO says, including 20 deaths.
]]>Set up in 1887, the Institut Pasteur boasts an impressive track record of 10 Nobel Prize laureates. Today, it is a nonprofit research foundation focused on infectious diseases with a budget worth €243.6 million in 2011; IGAS says that includes about €60 million from the French government and €50 million in donations every year, including many small contributions from private citizens.
Pasteur tells its donors that donations and bequests make up a third of the institute's funding, while the actual figure is less than 20%, the report's authors write. They add that the institute "artificially" presents its balance sheet to funders as "structurally in the red" to appear vulnerable and dependent on external funding, including from France's research ministry.
]]> But in fact, the organization is well-off, the report says: The institute's endowment was worth €658 million in investment funds in 2011—bringing its total wealth to about €1 billion, including real estate assets. The authors say that management of these funds should be better controlled and less risky, "if only to get closer to the will of donors who wish to contribute to research efforts, not to gamble on the evolution of financial markets."The Institut Pasteur did not respond to requests for comment from ScienceInsider. In written statements published on its website on 3 and 6 May, the institute dismissed IGAS's accusations as "totally unfounded," "erroneous, unfair and malevolent," saying it would "not let [the report] tarnish its image and values." "The endowment allows the Institut Pasteur to shield itself from uncertainties that could affect the level of its different funding sources in the long term," one of the statements says. That's necessary because research activities often require funding over periods of 5 to 10 years, Pasteur's Director General Alice Dautry explained to national TV channel France 2.
But Alain Guédon, who served as Pasteur's vice president for business development between 2007 and 2009, says that IGAS is right. "It's true that you need money to manage science projects over 5 to 10 years, but that's true for a few million euros, not for several hundreds," he tells ScienceInsider. Guédon says he is "very pleased" with the report, which accurately reflects his own experience and frustration during his stint at the institute.
Dautry took over at Pasteur in 2005 after a tumultuous episode in which the institute's entire board of directors stepped down and her predecessor, Philippe Kourilsky, was forced to leave. In March, the board elected Christian Bréchot, a former head of France's National Institute of Health and Medical Research, to succeed her.
Geneviève Fioraso and Marisol Touraine, the French ministers in charge of research and health, respectively, have expressed their "trust" in Pasteur's "research excellence" and management in a reassuring, yet cautious joint statement. A research spokesperson tells ScienceInsider that the ministries will now take time to analyze the report. Out of 40 recommendations by IGAS, three are directed to the research ministry; suggestions include reviewing the amount of government funding allocated to Pasteur in light of the institute's "own wealth and actual funding needs."
IGAS carries out investigations on request from ministries in the field of health, social affairs, and labor policies. This report examined the Institut Pasteur's accounts between 2009 and 2011.
]]>At a press conference here today, K. Vijayraghavan, secretary of the Department of Biotechnology, announced that a vaccine against the predominant rotavirus strain circulating in India had compiled an "excellent safety and efficacy profile" in phase III clinical trials. ROTAVAC, the first fruits of the Indo-U.S. Vaccine Action Program, is expected to be on the market in early 2014. But some experts caution that the vaccine will not be a panacea. "It is unlikely that a single Indian strain of the virus will provide immunity to children all over India, since there is so much genetic variation in the rotavirus," says Jacob Puliyel, a pediatrician at St. Stephen's Hospital in New Delhi.
Rotavirus spreads easily through contaminated food and water; some 20 million children in India are infected every year. The virus causes severe diarrhea, often accompanied by vomiting and fever; most deaths are from dehydration in children who are not given treatment or inadequately treated by India's frail health care system.
]]> Hope for an Indian vaccine against rotavirus was born in 1985, when Maharaj Kishan Bhan, a vaccine researcher then at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences here identified a nonpathogenic strain of the virus. The vaccine effort gained momentum 13 years later, when the Indo-U.S. Vaccine Action Program selected a young pharmaceuticals company in Hyderabad, Bharat Biotech Ltd., to develop and manufacture the vaccine. Since then, the Indian government and foreign partners, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, have poured about $100 million into the project.In the phase III trial, 4532 newborns received ROTAVAC. Compared with a control group, the vaccine reduced severe diarrhea by 56% during the first year of life. The successful trial results are "a significant victory for India's scientific community," said Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, in a statement. (A partner in the collaboration, NIAID provided the strain tested in the ROTAVAC trial.) It was the first phase III efficacy trial conducted in India for any vaccine, notes Bhan, who adds that the vaccine should save tens of thousands of lives and $100 million a year in hospitalization costs. ROTAVAC's price is expected to be set at $1 per dose, and it will be administered as a series of three oral doses. That's almost 40 times cheaper than a pair of Western-manufactured vaccines now on the market in India.
]]>But heads still turned last week when NSF held a glitzy Washington, D.C., press event to announce $10 million in grants to nine university-based projects designed to lower dropout rates among minorities, women, and low-income students in computer science and engineering. The twist is that the "Graduate 10K+" initiative is being funded not by taxpayers but by two high-tech companies: Intel and GE.
The new effort is part of a broader push by the Obama administration for the private sector to supplement federal activities on many fronts. Specifically, it's an outgrowth of a now-defunct task force created by President Barack Obama in 2011 to improve U.S. competitiveness. (The Graduate 10K+ name is a nod to the president's goal of producing 1 million more STEM graduates by 2020.)
]]> The group of corporate, labor, and academic bigwigs who served on the president's so-called jobs council agreed that lower attrition rates among STEM majors was a key impediment to producing enough graduates with high-tech skills. However, Intel CEO Paul Otellini was able to persuade only one of his peers, GE's Jeff Immelt, who chaired the council, to chip in. So the resulting pot falls far short of the $100 million the CEOs were expected to pony up.Setting up this unique partnership was also a heavy lift. Tiffany Sargent, an industrial engineer and Intel lifer who had recently spent 2 years at NSF in a mid-career fellowship program, was given the assignment because of her familiarity with the agency. After brainstorming with her NSF counterpart in the education directorate, Barbara Olds, the pair decided that the best approach would be to piggyback on an existing $25-million-a-year NSF program to expand the undergraduate STEM talent pool. NSF put out a fast-track solicitation last fall for Graduate 10K+ and attracted 57 proposals, from which the nine winners were chosen.
The new program also had to scale a mountain of federal red tape. The issues included ensuring that the gift—$5 million from each company and $50,000 from New York investment banker Mark Gallogly—went for its intended purpose, creating a template for handling future gifts, and defining the proper supporting role for the companies in a program that NSF will manage. "It's not just the money, although we are deeply appreciative of that," says Kelvin Droegemeier, vice chair of NSF's oversight body, the National Science Board, during the kick-off event at The Newseum, which offers a panoramic view of the U.S. Capitol. "This is also a new programmatic structure, a way of increasing the country's investment in the next generation of computer scientists and engineers."
The money, up to $1.6 million over 5 years, will give grantees a chance to test a variety of strategies designed to help students overcome obstacles to academic success, especially in the first year. "We wouldn't have been able to run the program without this grant," says Eve Riskin, an electrical engineer and associate dean at the University of Washington, which is teaming with Washington State University to provide new students with an extra year of math and other basic courses before they plunge into the prescribed curriculum. The two universities have borrowed a successful formula developed at the University of Colorado, Boulder, she says. Success will require "working with one student at a time," she says, and the NSF grant will allow for a full-time coordinator on each campus.
Faculty at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSU-MB), had already teamed up with a local 2-year school, Hartnell College, on a program helping students make the transition to a bachelor's degree in computer science, says CSU's Sathya Narayanan, another grantee. "But the NSF grant gives us what we need to do it right," he says.
The project will also reach into local high schools to build awareness of the field. "Part of the problem of attracting students into computer science is that they have no experience with computational thinking and abstraction," says Narayanan. "Unless physics or chemistry or biology, most of them have never taken a real computer science course."
Cassandra Martin, a junior computer science major at CSU-MB, says she had never considered going into the field until Hartnell's Joe Welch convinced her that she could be successful. Now Martin, whose family came from Mexico, is planning to get a Ph.D.
"I'm the first one to go to college, and I'm enjoying school so much that I want to see how far I can go," she says. Most of her education has been financed by other NSF-run programs, she says, and whenever she visits her high school she encourages other Latinas to follow in her footsteps.
Despite the prominent launch, the Graduate 10K+ program faces an uncertain future. The president's 2014 budget requests a small increase for a cluster of undergraduate programs that includes the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Talent Expansion Program, and NSF officials say they hope to find money for a second round of awards. But any growth in federal funding may be difficult in the current tight budget climate, and no other companies so far have jumped into the breach. Intel officials say they love the program but are awaiting direction from their new CEO, Brian Krzanich, who takes the helm on Friday.
In the meantime, Sargent—a former science and technology policy fellow of the AAAS (publisher of ScienceInsider)—is relentlessly optimistic. She says that her "hobby job," a term Intel employees use to describe external activities that the company encourages, demonstrates how society can benefit from having industry scientists take temporary positions within the government. "It's a situation in which everybody wins," she says.
]]>The court ruled that Monsanto's patents cover not just genetically engineered seeds distributed by Monsanto and its agents, but also seeds circulating in the environment that contain Monsanto's genes.
Bowman never disputed Monsanto's patents—which apply to genes that make soybeans resistant to the herbicide glyphosate. But he claimed that the company's right to charge royalties had been "exhausted" because the unlabeled seeds he bought from a local dealer and planted were the progeny of plants grown from previously purchased Monsanto seed. As a result, Bowman argued that his seed purchases weren't covered by Monsanto's customary patent license. Although Bowman had signed a Monsanto license in previous years—and paid the extra required fees—he did not continue to do so. Instead, he bought "commodity beans," which are usually sold for feed or other products, from a local granary. He later sprayed glyphosate on his crop and saw that it flourished, indicating that the anonymous seeds contained Monsanto's genes. He said he had written to Monsanto seeking information on its patent license rules, but argued that he never got a clear answer. Instead, Monsanto took him to court for violating its license.
Speaking for the entire court, Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the 13 May opinion: "The question in this case is whether a farmer who buys patented seeds may reproduce them through planting and harvesting without the patent holder's permission. We hold that he may not."
]]> The court also rejected an argument that Bowman was not liable because the beans themselves—and not the farmer—replicated Monsanto's patented genes. "But we think that blame-the-bean defense tough to credit," Kagan wrote. "Bowman was not a passive observer of his soybeans' multiplication; or put another way, the seeds he purchased (miraculous though they might be in other respects) did not spontaneously create eight successive soybean crops."Kagan's opinion also noted that the ruling may not have broad implications. "Our holding today is limited—addressing the situation before us, rather than every one involving a self-replicating product," she wrote. "We recognize that such inventions are becoming ever more prevalent, complex, and diverse. In another case, the article's self-replication might occur outside the purchaser's control. Or it might be a necessary but incidental step in using the item for another purpose." So judges will have to look at every case on its merits.
]]>Under the new decree, organization's will have to apply to the ministry for every grant and complete a bulky set of forms that include the bank details of the organization and the would-be grantee, the subject of the research, the purpose of the support, and so on. If the project to be funded is not in line with the main priorities of basic research and R&D in Russia approved by the government, the ministry may decline the request and the organization will not be allowed to award the grants. Tsaturyan believes that most painfully, the new regulations will affect research in medical sciences and humanities as the physical sciences are now rarely funded by international foundations.
The new regulations have raised serious worries among the researchers. Evgeny Onishchenko of the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences thinks the decree is an absurd and very dangerous example of bureaucratic zeal. "The fact that an application will be required for each specific grant will cause bureaucratic hurdles," he says. In his view, the demand that the research subject must fit in with officially approved research priorities is ridiculous. "The government should be happy that someone supports research that is not a government priority," he says.
]]> Onishchenko hopes that researchers' protests will lead to the new rules being either strongly amended or totally revoked. In any event, he says, bearing in mind the government's current xenophobic attitude, "One can expect persecution of those scientists who do the research in collaboration with foreign colleagues."Tsaturyan, who also co-chairs the Council of the Russian Researchers' Society, an informal association of researchers seeking to revive the scientific community, is even more pessimistic. "Effectively, the decree introduces a total ban on foreign grant funding of research. If organizations know that each time they award a grant to a Russian candidate they will have to request permission and risk refusal, they will just stop giving us grants. They will just turn their back on us and walk away," he says.
The decree does include a list of agencies that are exempt from the rules. According to Tsaturyan, this list was originally compiled in the 1990s to exempt foreign grants from taxes and customs duties. "The list used to be very long but now it is replaced by another one, which consists of only 13 agencies, including IAEA [the International Atomic Energy Agency], a few U.N. organizations, the Council of the Baltic Sea States, etc., that is, bodies of which Russia is a member. There is no serious scientific foundation on this list," he says.
]]>"I find this a little sad as a debate," says Joël Bockaert, a member of the French science academy who directs a biomedical research collaboration in Montpellier.
At the heart of the controversy is the bill's proposal to relax a 1994 provision that makes the use of French compulsory in higher education except in foreign language classes or in classes given by invited professors from abroad. The new law would add two more exceptions by allowing foreign languages to be used in classes that are offered either as part of an agreement with foreign institutions or that belong to a European program. The idea behind the measure is to help attract foreign students to France and to better prepare French students for a globalized world, the Ministry of Higher Education and Research explained in a document accompanying the new draft bill, which was presented by science minister Geneviève Fioraso on 20 March. Unless France makes such efforts to attract foreign students, Fioraso told Libération, "we will be left to having five people discussing Proust around a table."
]]> But some prominent academics, especially in the social sciences, saw the proposal as a threat to the French language. On 22 March, the French Academy called on lawmakers to prevent the changes, saying they favored "the marginalizing of our language."Yesterday, Fioraso defended the measure in a radio interview, clarifying that "French remains the language of teaching of all our universities." But exceptions to the rule have been broadened, "mainly in the scientific fields [of] exact sciences," she added. "These are above all the human and social sciences that got upset, and justifiably, because … the accuracy of the concepts that are used, it is very difficult to translate."
The debate is a " disconcerting quarrel," six prominent scientists argued in Le Monde earlier this week. The group included Nobel laureate and virologist Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and others who last year helped lead a national consultation on the draft bill. Many universities have already started to use English as the teaching language for some of their courses in line with scientific and education needs, they noted, so "the voices that raise in the name of the defense of the French language thus seem to us totally out of touch with reality."
"Placing our country into a linguistic bunker is a defensive and harmful fight," an anonymous group of researchers and university professors wrote in Le Monde on 25 April. It "will not increase the influence of our higher education and research," they added. "On the contrary, [it] carries the risk of penalizing a youth that doesn't need any additional hurdles to enter the international scene."
Other researchers, including Bockaert, echo such views. French science students would benefit from a better mastery of English, the current lingua franca of science, he says. Offering some classes in English starting at master's level would be "the minimum" universities should do to welcome foreign students, he adds. And because the law doesn't actually impose the use of English, "it really is a useless debate," he says.
The debate over English is "a micro-phenomenon of diversion," sociologist Vérène Chevalier of Université Paris Est-Créteil - Val de Marne and the research association Sauvons la Recherche (SLR), told ScienceInsider. There is no such debate going on within the ranks of SLR, she adds. "The French press only talks about that. But if this was the only problem that there was in the law, we would all be happy."
To call attention to those other problems, French trade unions, science groups and researchers are planning a national protest to be held in Paris on 22 May. Among their major concerns are how the bill would allocate funds to researchers and universities, create large ensembles of universities that would reduce the role of students and staff in the decision-making, and affect the job stability of researchers on short-term contracts.
]]>Brominated flame retardants are very good at preventing plastics and textiles from catching fire. They also tend to persist in the environment and accumulate in biological tissue. Out of concern for possible human health effects, the convention in 2009 banned tetrabromodiphenyl ether and pentabromodiphenyl ether.
According to the convention's description of HBCD, the chemical is made in the United States, Europe, and Asia. In 2001, about half of the 16,500 tons on the market was used in Europe. By 2003, global demand had risen to nearly 22,000 tons.
]]> With HBCD now on the convention's list of pollutants, countries must work to eliminate its use. The European Union's toxics program, called REACH, had already identified HBCD as a "substance of very high concern" and called for its phase-out by 2015. But David Azoulay, managing attorney for the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) in Geneva, Switzerland, says that the global ban is a good step. "The ban prevents other countries from adopting this chemical for existing or developing new uses for it," he told ScienceInsider.CIEL and other environmental groups were disappointed that the European Union was granted a 5-year exception for using HBCD in expanded and extruded polystyrene insulation in buildings. Companies that make HBCD for this purpose must notify the convention, clearly identify their products, and cannot export them from the European Union.
]]>About 300 million people in Africa depend on cassava, a root that is ground into flour, used as starch, biofuel, and for brewed into beer. For a century, production across the continent has been hindered by outbreaks of cassava mosaic disease, which is caused by several viruses. Breeding of new varieties helped get this problem mostly under control, but in the last decade cassava brown streak disease (CBSD) has emerged as an even more serious concern. The virus can wipe out the root crop underground without a farmer noticing until harvest.
CBSD has been afflicting crops in east and central Africa. Now there are worrying signs it is moving west. Whiteflies, which spread the viruses, have been found east of the Congo, the world's third largest source of cassava. If the disease were to reach into Nigeria, Congo, and Ghana, which all grow a lot of cassava, "it would be a human disaster, an economical disaster, and would translate to a lot of instability," says Claude Fauquet of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Cali, Colombia.
]]> Fauquet helped organize the meeting, which included representatives from 22 organizations, including the World Bank, U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, the Gates Foundation, and others. "There is urgency to get organized internationally to better control these diseases," Fauquet says.Attendees at the meeting committed to developing a surveillance system to prevent outbreaks from blowing up into epidemics. The disease is "relatively easy to eradicate when you have a few [infected] acres," Fauquet says. The surveillance system would first be implemented in Africa and then perhaps expanded to Southeast Asia, which is now also growing cassava. In a second step, the partnership will focus on eradicating the disease where it is already present. The third component is to create a public-private partnership that will provide farmers with high-quality, disease-free seed. They will also begin and coordinate research projects, such as breeding plants that can resist the disease and the white flies.
The groups did not discuss a price tag for these projects, but within 2 months they will publish a road map of actions needed and then work out a budget.
]]>On 25 April, Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) wrote to acting NSF Director Cora Marrett about his "concerns regarding some grants approved by the foundation and how closely they adhere to NSF's 'intellectual merit' guideline." Smith requested "access" to both the reviews from outside scientists and the analyses of the program officers who funded them.
Scientific leaders and senior House Democrats have condemned that request and related draft legislation that would alter NSF's grant-making process, viewing it as an unwarranted intrusion into NSF's vaunted peer review system. On Wednesday, three former NSF directors asked Smith to "rescind the April 25, 2013 letter and keep this draft bill from ever coming up for a vote or from being incorporated in other legislation."
]]> Smith had asked for the grants information "within 2 weeks," a period that ended yesterday. NSF met that deadline, barely, submitting an "interim" response by the close of business.But NSF's response doesn't contain the information Smith is seeking. Instead, Marrett told the National Science Board this afternoon that, "at the request of chairman Dan Arvizu, I have told Mr. Smith that I would respond by the end of next week following input from the board."
That delay postpones appears to be okay with Smith. "The Chairman looks forward to reviewing the full response, including all of the information requested in the April 25 letter," a committee aide says.
]]>In one of two 8 May letters to Smith, the former officials say that the draft legislation, entitled "The High-Quality Research Act," "will have a chilling and detrimental impact on the merit-based review process." Smith, who is chair of the House of Representatives science committee, has said that the legislation is intended to weed out projects not worthy of federal support. But the letter writers say that "rather than improving the quality of research, [the changes] would do just the opposite."
That letter is signed by three previous NSF directors—Neal Lane, Rita Colwell, and Arden Bement—and three past chairs of the National Science Board, NSF's presidentially appointed oversight body. The second letter, from 18 scientists who once headed individual research directorates at the agency, also argues that many of NSF's most spectacular successes would not have qualified for funding under the terms of the legislation.
]]> "It's just an awful piece of legislation," says Michael Turner, former head of the math and physical sciences program at NSF and incoming president of the American Physical Society. "And we're hoping that it is never introduced."Asked about the status of his draft bill, Smith issued a statement calling it "a starting point to determine how the NSF grant process can be improved. And I welcome the input of individuals involved in that process." According to Smith, "we agree that the peer review process should remain intact, and that basic research should be supported. … Priorities have to be set so that taxpayer funded grants go to the highest quality research possible."
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