News of the Week
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News of the Week

RESEARCH ETHICS:
Germany Gets in Step With Scientific Misconduct Rules

Adam Bostanci

BERLIN--Five years after a major fraud scandal rocked the scientific establishment, Germany's universities are about to get their first binding standards of ethical research. Universities must implement the new rules by the end of this month or risk being ruled ineligible for grants from the country's main research funding body, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

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INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY:
High Court Reins In Patent Pirates

David Malakoff

The U.S. Supreme Court has scaled back a controversial lower court ruling that some feared would open the door to wholesale copying of patented inventions. Research universities and some technology firms are applauding last week's unanimous decision, saying it will help protect valuable discoveries. But others say it will do little to reduce the growing number of costly patent fights.

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BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH:
Australia Pushes Stem Cell Advantage

Leigh Dayton

SYDNEY--Australia's new policy on embryonic stem (ES) cells has already started to pay big dividends for researchers. Last week the government announced that it will invest $25 million in a new Center for Stem Cells and Tissue Repair at Monash University in Melbourne that will work to develop therapies for blood and tissue diseases based on new and existing ES cell lines.

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SWITZERLAND:
Report Aims to Rescue Science From Doldrums

Giselle Weiss

BERN--A decade of stagnation has sent Swiss science into a downward spiral that only broad reforms and a massive infusion of funds can reverse. That, at least, is the diagnosis offered last week by the Swiss government's science advisory body. However, it's unclear whether leaders of the Swiss Federal Council, the government's executive branch, are prepared to prescribe strong medicine.

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MATERIALS SCIENCE:
Lighting Initiative Flickers to Life

David Malakoff

Researchers met in New Mexico last week to map out priorities for the proposed Next Generation Lighting Initiative embedded in a broader energy bill moving through Congress. The 10-year, $500 million project is designed to help the United States stay ahead of competitors in Japan, Europe, and Korea for global leadership in the $40 billion lighting industry.

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PARTICLE PHYSICS:
Dark-Matter 'Sighting' Returns to Shadows

Charles Seife

MUNICH, GERMANY--Dark matter is, officially, still dark. Results from a French experiment called EDELWEISS presented at a meeting here last week have convinced most physicists who have seen them that a controversial "discovery" of dark matter is in error.

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INFECTIOUS DISEASE:
Cholera Strengthened by Trip Through Gut

Elizabeth Pennisi

Microbiologists have discovered that the human gut seems to prime the bacteria responsible for cholera. Before Vibrio cholerae exit the body in watery stools, something about the intestinal environment causes them to rev up the activity of certain genes. These genes, in turn, seem to prepare them for ever more effective colonization of their next victims, possibly fueling epidemics, they report in the 6 June issue of Nature.

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ORGANIC CHEMISTRY:
New-Model Reactions Skip the Drip

Robert F. Service

In the latest issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, a team of materials scientists reports that it has carried out a battery of common organic chemistry reactions using solid compounds, without first dissolving them in the usual liquid solvents. If this new "dry chemistry" approach works for other reactions, it could light a fire under attempts to make everyday compounds without using toxic organic solvents.

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ECOLOGY:
Signs of Stress Seen in Snowmobile Season

Jay Withgott

As biologists, recreationists, and policy-makers debate whether snowmobiles should be allowed in U.S. national parks, a new study of animal feces suggests that the noisy machines raise the stress hormone levels of elk and wolves. It's not clear, however, whether the glucocorticoid levels measured are detrimental to the animals

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CANADA:
Social Scientists Go for a Political Dip

Wayne Kondro

TORONTO--Canada's social scientists have complained for years about getting the short end of the funding stick. But last week they began a national lobbying campaign after the head of the social sciences council announced that he would be forced to end the council's bread-and-butter awards to individual investigators unless the government comes through with substantial funding increases.

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RICE SEQUENCE DATA:
Syngenta Agrees to Wider Release

Dennis Normile

TOKYO--The company that published a draft sequence of the rice genome earlier this year has agreed to a fuller release of its data. On 23 May Syngenta, a Swiss-based agricultural biotechnology giant, announced that it would transfer the assembled sequence together with the underlying data to the publicly funded International Rice Genome Sequencing Project (IRGSP), which is working on its own draft of the rice genome. The Syngenta data will be incorporated into the IRGSP sequence, which will be deposited in public databases.

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GLOBAL WARMING:
Rain Might Be Leading Carbon Sink Factor

Richard A. Lovett

Mainland U.S. ecosystems are absorbing an unexpectedly large amount of carbon dioxide, and scientists have been at a loss to explain it. Now, a study published online by Geophysical Research Letters on 28 May suggests that the increased rainfall and humidity documented in the continental United States might be the single most important factor spurring increased plant growth; this, in turn, is slowing the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

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News Focus

SPACE SCIENCE:
Science Emerges From Shadows of China's Space Program

Dennis Normile and Ding Yimin

BEIJING--Over the next 5 years, China is planning to double its launch rate of scientific satellites, with at least seven now on the drawing board. The growth in basic research is a dividend from China's investment in a piloted space program. The new efforts include international collaborations such as a joint project with European scientists to study Earth's magnetosphere (see sidebar). China hopes that better ties with the U.S. program will follow.

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SPACE SCIENCE:
China Teams With Europe on Exploration of Magnetosphere

Dennis Normile

BEIJING--China's space science efforts are dominated by applied studies of Earth resources, meteorology, and oceanography. But the country is also planning one mission that is purely basic research: Double Star, a two-satellite collaborative project of the China National Space Administration and the European Space Agency to monitor the magnetosphere.

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ARCHAEOLOGY:
Report of Oldest Boat Hints at Early Trade Routes

Andrew Lawler

LONDON--A Kuwaiti site has yielded 7000-year-old bitumen slabs thought to be from a seafaring vessel. If the interpretation of the material is correct, the discovery pushes back physical evidence of boats by more than 2000 years and sheds light on what later became trading routes linking two ancient civilizations: those of the Indus River valley and Mesopotamia. A second team is finishing a controversial reconstruction of a younger ship found in Oman.

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EVOLUTION AND DEVELOPMENT:
Comparative Biology Joins the Molecular Age

Elizabeth Pennisi

The genome sequences of the "model" organisms targeted by the Human Genome Project can't explain many mysteries of development, and they provide few clues about evolution or the complement of genes necessary for each class of organism. To answer such questions, researchers are sequencing the genomes of organisms ever farther down the tree of life. As evidenced by the talks given at an evo-devo meeting in April, which tapped everything from jellyfish and the flatworm planaria to coelacanths, a living fossil fish, this has given rise to a new form of comparative biology--this time with a molecular spin.

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