SCIENCE News Summaries, Volume 331, Issue 6022
dated March 11 2011, is now available at: - http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol331/issue6022/news-summaries.dtl
A copy of the "SCIENCE News This Week" section has been appended below.
SCIENCE News This Week
March 11 2011, 331 (6022)
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, a new long-term study of a generation was announced in London, China is beefing up its space program, a rocket failure sent a NASA satellite plunging into the South Pacific, U.K. funding bodies decided the weight of research "impact," a Brazilian panel reassessed the country's R&D spending, a U.S. bioethics panel examined global clinical trials, and Costa Rica expanded a marine management area. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6022/1246-b?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/11-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6022.1246-b
Random Sample The computer language COBOL is the subject of an exhibition opening 17 March at the Smithsonian. Materials scientists in Japan say they can make the compound iron tellurium sulfide (FeTeS) conduct electricity without resistance if they first soak the stuff in booze. And this week's numbers quantify Jeopardy! scores, electric-car sales, and the cost of identifying Earth's estimated 5.4 million undiscovered animal species. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6022/1246-c?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/11-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6022.1246-c
Newsmakers This week's Newsmakers are Zahi Hawass, who announced last week that he intended to resign his post as minister of Egypt's antiquities in the wake of the country's revolution, and three Hungarian-born scientists who have been honored with a new  1 million award from a Danish nonprofit organization for their contributions to European neuroscience. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6022/1247?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/11-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6022.1247
FINDINGS
Elephants Can Lend a Helping Trunk Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6022/1248-a?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/11-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6022.1248-a
Bad for the Bone Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6022/1248-b?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/11-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6022.1248-b
Battle-Scarred Mars Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6022/1248-c?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/11-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6022.1248-c
More Evidence That Chimps Die From AIDS Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6022/1249-a?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/11-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6022.1249-a
Shedding Light on Anxiety Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6022/1249-b?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/11-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6022.1249-b
NEWS & ANALYSIS
China Bets Big on Small Grants, Large Facilities Richard Stone* Some nations talk about doubling the budgets of their basic research funding agencies. China's doing it. The National Natural Sciences Foundation of China, the country's main agency for funding competitive, peer-reviewed research grants, will get 12 billion yuan ($1.83 billion) in 2011—a 17% increase over 2010 and twice its budget just 2 years ago. Still, some science policy experts and researchers in China decry the lack of a coherent strategy behind the ramp-up of science spending. China's R&D programs, says one senior scientist who requested anonymity, are stacked "like a layer cake" with little holding them together. * With reporting by Hao Xin. * With reporting by Hao Xin. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6022/1251?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/11-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6022.1251
Ten Months After Deepwater Horizon, Picking Up the Remnants of Health Data Sara Reardon On 28 February, after 10 months of hearing anecdotal stories of flulike symptoms, rashes, heat stroke, and stress from cleanup workers in the Gulf of Mexico, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services launched the long-awaited Gulf Long-term Follow-up Study through the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. The largest, most comprehensive study of long-term health effects from an oil spill, it will attempt to collect health data on cleanup workers by contacting 100,000 of them directly and tracking 55,000 for at least 5 years, looking at long-term problems such as cancer, birth defects, and psychosocial issues. But at this juncture, experts worry that they won't know what to look for. Any short-term physiological effects such as elevated levels of biomarkers or telltale rashes that could be definitively linked to the spill are long gone, as are toxicants in workers' blood that could have provided information on exposure levels. What remains is an economically depressed community in which many suffer from stress-related illnesses that will be difficult to pin on any particular cause. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6022/1252?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/11-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6022.1252
More Negative Data for Link Between Mouse Virus and Human Disease Jon Cohen A new finding presented at a conference last week throws cold water on the impassioned debate about the link between a novel mouse retrovirus and prostate cancer and chronic fatigue syndrome in humans. Yet few believe it will end the controversy, which began in 2006. In an extensive sleuthing expedition that looked back nearly 20 years, two collaborating research teams contend that they have evidence that xenotropic murine leukemia virus–related virus (XMRV) resulted from the chance recombination of pieces of two mouse viruses in lab experiments and that the connections to human disease are spurious. But even if XMRV is not a threat to human health, the fact that a retrovirus that can readily infect human cells was apparently generated by chance in the lab raises some interesting and potentially troubling issues. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6022/1253?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/11-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6022.1253
Price Tags for Planet Missions Force NASA to Lower Its Sights Richard A. Kerr Scientists choosing the missions they want to send across the solar system in the next decade knew their recommended program wouldn't come cheap. But for the first time in a planetary science decadal survey, outside consultants estimated mission costs, and the process has produced huge numbers for the largest proposed missions. Those numbers have forced some painful and unprecedented recommendations in the committee's report, which was released Monday evening at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6022/1254?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/11-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6022.1254
NEWS FOCUS
Counting the Dead in Afghanistan John Bohannon In January, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) provided Science with the military's internal record of the death and injury of Afghan civilians, broken down by month, region, weaponry, and perpetrator. By its reckoning, 2537 civilians were killed and 5594 were wounded over the past 2 years, with 12% of those casualties attributed to ISAF forces and the rest to insurgents. In February, after learning that the military was releasing these data, both the United Nations and an Afghan human rights organization agreed to release versions of their own civilian casualty data to Science. Science assembled a team of experts to analyze the released data sets. They conclude that while the war has grown deadlier for Afghan civilians over the past 2 years, ISAF has become a safer fighting force. The majority of deaths, and nearly all of the recent increase, are attributed to indiscriminate attacks by insurgents rather than ISAF soldiers. All of these data, as well as other information never before released, are now freely available online. Taken together, they provide the clearest picture yet of the human cost of the war. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6022/1256?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/11-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6022.1256
War as a Laboratory For Trauma Research John Bohannon In many ways, war is the perfect laboratory for trauma medicine research. On any given day, dozens or even hundreds of casualties arrive by helicopter to military hospitals across Iraq and Afghanistan. IEDs are the number one risk, often combining burns, deep lacerations from shrapnel, and brain trauma from blast waves. Injuries like these are too rare to study in peacetime. And because all the patients are military personnel, they come with exhaustive data relating to preinjury health and postinjury outcome. Many of the insights gained from battlefield studies have found their way into civilian emergency medicine. But war is also the most chaotic and stressful environment imaginable for doing science. Adding to the difficulty, controversy has dogged medical research conducted in Iraq and Afghanistan, including charges by journalists that researchers rushed experimental treatments onto the battlefield without proper ethical review or sufficient safety testing, needlessly risking the lives of soldiers. Science investigated these issues with the help of two bioethicists and several sources from both civilian and military trauma medicine. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6022/1261?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/11-March-2011/10.1126/science.331.6022.1261
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