SCIENCE News Summaries, Volume 331, Issue 6021
dated March 4 2011, is now available at: - http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol331/issue6021/news-summaries.dtl
A copy of the "SCIENCE News This Week" section has been appended below.
SCIENCE News This Week
March 4 2011, 331 (6021)
NEWS OF THE WEEK
This Week's Section Follow the links below for a roundup of the week's top stories in science, or download a PDF of the entire section.
Around the World In science news around the world this week, foreign researchers are abandoning field sites in Libya, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of a vaccinemaker, Peru is cracking down on illegal gold-mining operations, and Alan Turing's papers have been purchased by a U.K. museum. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6021/1118-b?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/4-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6021.1118-b
Newsmakers This week's Newsmakers are former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold, who has written a new cookbook, and Arun Majumdar, who has been appointed acting under secretary for energy at the Department of Energy. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6021/1119-a?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/4-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6021.1119-a
Random Sample A massive exhibit opening this week features a brand-new reconstruction of Ötzi the Iceman. An Escherichia coli rendition of Google's logo has been entered in Google Demo Slam, a contest that pits one video against another and lets users vote on a champ. And this week's numbers quantify Indian S&T funding, threatened coral reefs, and clinical trials being submitted to ClinicalTrials.gov. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6021/1119-b?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/4-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6021.1119-b
FINDINGS
Visions From Africa Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6021/1119-c?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/4-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6021.1119-c
Stage Set for Sixth Mass Extinction of Animals Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6021/1119-d?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/4-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6021.1119-d
Weird Matter Seen in Neutron Stars Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6021/1120-a?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/4-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6021.1120-a
Indonesia's Mud Volcano to Flow On and On Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6021/1120-b?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/4-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6021.1120-b
NEWS & ANALYSIS
Scientists Fear WFIRST Will Be Trailing the Pack Yudhijit Bhattacharjee Last August, a National Academies panel charged with ranking the priorities of U.S. astronomers for the next decade identified the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) as its top choice in the category of space observatories. The panel recommended that NASA launch the $1.6 billion mission by 2020 as the best way to advance the study of dark energy and the search for new extrasolar planets. But the ballooning cost of the James Webb Space Telescope, and the resulting delays in its launch, have all but guaranteed that the space agency will not be able to deliver WFIRST by 2025, much less the end of the decade. And NASA has rejected a backup plan that would have given it a 20% stake in a similar European dark energy mission. That decision, announced last week, leaves U.S. astronomers with the prospect of being marginalized in the next decade. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6021/1121?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/4-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6021.1121
Do Island Sites Suggest a Coastal Route to the Americas? Michael Balter About 12,000 years ago, on Santa Rosa Island off the coast of California, a group of prehistoric hunters bagged geese, cormorants, and albatross, perhaps using crescent-shaped stone points to stun the birds. They also caught an array of fish, including surfperch and rockfish, probably spearing them with barbed stone points also used to hunt seals. These sea goers must have crossed 10 kilometers of open water from the coast near what is now Santa Barbara to reach the island, and they also visited nearby San Miguel Island, where they raked in bountiful amounts of red abalone, mussels, snails, and crabs. On page 1181 of this week's issue of Science, archaeologists detail the remains of these ancient hunts: thousands of bird, fish, and sea-mammal bones, as well as shells and the characteristic stone points. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6021/1122?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/4-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6021.1122
Feathers Are Flying Over Colombian Bird Name Flap Antonio Regalado Last May, the American Bird Conservancy (ABC) and its partner in Colombia, Fundación ProAves, announced the discovery of a new species of Neotropical bird. ABC touted the feat as "remarkable" for being one of the first times a new species had been scientifically described from an individual captured, measured, photographed, and then released. For George Fenwick, head of ABC, it was a proud moment: The bird, Fenwick's antpitta (Grallaria fenwickorum), was named in honor of his family. But the announcement made no mention of the bird's actual discoverer, a former employee of ProAves named Diego Carantón, and the two preserved specimens he had already collected. How Carantón, his specimens, and the name he had chosen—Grallaria urraoensis—came to be omitted from the taxonomic record is generating bitter debate between Colombia's leading university ornithologists and ProAves, the country's best-known private conservation organization, over scientific standards and credit for new discoveries. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6021/1123?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/4-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6021.1123
Ten Years After Buddhas Destroyed, Afghans Work to Save Monastery Andrew Lawler A decade ago this week, the Taliban began its destruction of the world's two largest Buddha statues, which had stood watch over central Afghanistan's Bamiyan Valley for some 1500 years. This week, cultural heritage officials met in Paris to review years of work to stabilize the fragile niches that had held the statues and to prepare for the spring opening of an open-air museum at the site. Afghan archaeologists are also focusing on another Buddhist complex 200 kilometers south of Bamiyan, called Mes Aynak, that stands in peril of destruction because it sits atop the world's second largest deposit of copper. The government and a Chinese mining company have agreed to delay operations. But to preserve Mes Aynak's treasures will require a huge international rescue effort—perhaps the largest archaeological endeavor ever undertaken in Afghanistan. Plans for the project face time, money, and security constraints in the war-torn country. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6021/1124?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/4-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6021.1124
Outrage Greets NSF Decision to End STEM Fellows Program Jeffrey Mervis Researchers are shocked and upset by a decision by the U.S. National Science Foundation to cancel a high-profile and successful fellowship program that has brought more than 10,000 graduate students into elementary and secondary schools around the country. A recent evaluation says the Graduate Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Fellows in K–12 Education program, begun in 1999, brings science to life for students, improves the skills of their teachers, and offers graduate students valuable training in the classroom. So participants don't understand why the president's 2012 budget request would abandon a $55-million-a-year program that addresses key aspects of the Obama Administration's push to improve U.S. science and math education. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6021/1127?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/4-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6021.1127
NEWS FOCUS
Breaking the Chain in Bangladesh Richard Stone Nipah virus claims few lives, but in Bangladesh, where nearly all known cases in the past decade have occurred, the virus kills almost three-quarters of those it infects and leaves many survivors with crippling neurological disorders. Almost every winter since 2001, the virus has flared up in Bangladesh and has killed 111 people in the past decade; 50 people died in 2004, the worst year. This winter is shaping up to be bad, with the death toll at 27 as Science went to press—and 2 months to go in the Nipah season. Disease hunters believe they have pinned down the virus's natural reservoir—fruit bats—and they have nailed a transmission route in Bangladesh: consumption of contaminated date palm sap. But fruit bats test positive for Nipah antibodies across southern Asia, and date palm sap is a delicacy throughout Bangladesh. Yet the virus mostly haunts only what investigators call "the Nipah belt," a clutch of districts near the Ganges River in western Bangladesh. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6021/1128?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/4-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6021.1128
A Startling Villain Richard Stone The surprising culprit disease sleuths uncovered when villagers in northeastern Bangladesh began dying 3 years ago sends a chilling warning to regions facing food shortages. After a few days, a common thread began to emerge. Victims had eaten a plant that locals call gaghra shak, the seeds and seedlings of which contain a toxin, carboxyatratyloside. That summer, monsoon flooding had reduced rice yields, and impoverished villagers had resorted to eating the seedlings. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6021/1130?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/4-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6021.1130
Have Physicists Already Glimpsed Particles of Dark Matter? Adrian Cho For decades, astronomers' observations have indicated that some elusive "dark matter" provides most of the gravity needed to keep the stars from flying out of the galaxies. In recent years, cosmologists' studies of the afterglow of the big bang, the cosmic microwave background, have indicated that dark matter makes up 80% of all matter in the universe. Now, many physicists expect that within 5 to 10 years they will finally discover particles of dark matter—that is, if they haven't already done so. Data from three experiments all suggest that physicists have glimpsed dark matter particles much less massive than they had expected, or so argues a group of theorists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Physicists working on other experiments say their results rule out such particles, but the Fermilab group contends that a realistic look at the data and the uncertainties shows no fatal contradictions. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6021/1132?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/4-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6021.1132
Keeping Europe's Basic Research Agency on Track Martin Enserink There were a few times when Helga Nowotny considered throwing in the towel and abandoning the fledgling European Research Council (ERC) she'd helped create. The thought would typically arise when she couldn't bear the weight of the Brussels bureaucracy anymore. Throughout the birth and the 4-year existence of the ERC, scientists' ideas on how to run a funding agency for creative frontier science have clashed with the European Commission's (EC's) rules for managing an international bureaucracy. For the scientific council—a group of 22 heavyweights from across Europe, which Nowotny now chairs—it has been a steep learning curve and a source of deep frustration. Nowotny still has two major tasks to accomplish before she steps down in 2013, at the end of the ERC's first 7-year mandate. One is an overhaul of the organizational structure that she hopes will put it on more solid ground and wrest power away from the officials and politicians of the EC. The other is a substantial hike in the ERC budget for the period from 2014 to 2020. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6021/1134?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/4-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6021.1134
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