As the COVID-19 vaccine rollout has continued in the United States, a parallel vaccination effort has taken place in some U.S. zoos to protect their animals, particularly great apes. Now, a chimpanzee sanctuary in Georgia is ready to do the same, saying it intends to soon give an experimental COVID-19 vaccine to its primates, who are likely also vulnerable to the pandemic coronavirus.

“Having consulted with our vet and several other zoo individuals, we’re confident that it’s the right decision for us,” says Ali Crumpacker, executive director of the Project Chimps sanctuary. Additional U.S. chimp sanctuaries tell Science they are discussing whether to vaccinate their animals and will watch others’ efforts closely. But some say they don’t see a pressing need to do so, given other precautions they have taken.

Primatologists have worried about great apes, both captive and in the wild, since the start of the pandemic. Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and bonobos all share versions of the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2, the cell surface receptor to which SARS-CoV-2 binds to initiate infections. Moreover, human respiratory infections have devastated great ape populations in the past. “Great apes are susceptible,” to COVID-19, says Jon Epstein, vice president for science and research at EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit devoted to protecting wild animals, and people, from pathogens. “There are real, legitimate conservation concerns with this infectious disease.”

The sweeping report documenting the world’s changing climate released Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) puts a spotlight on China. The report, based on 14,000 studies, highlights the problems the country will face as the climate warms, from increased flooding and droughts to devastating cyclones. But it should also serve as a warning for the Chinese government to cut its emissions more rapidly, some climate policy experts say.

China is responsible for more than one-quarter of the world’s annual carbon dioxide emissions, yet it has lagged other big emitters in pledges to reduce its output. Whether China can begin to slash its emissions significantly in the next 10 years will play a large role in determining the magnitude of the global climate crisis, they say.

“We know China is [currently] the main contributor of carbon dioxide emissions, so that is why China is devoted to decreasing our contribution,” says Wang Wen, a hydrologist at Hohai University and one of the lead authors of the report’s chapter on the regional impacts of climate change.

A controversial move to allow hunters in Wisconsin to kill up to 300 wolves this year could imperil the state’s wolf population, conservation biologists say. The Wisconsin Natural Resources Board voted yesterday to approve the quota for the November hunt, ignoring a recommendation from an advisory panel to limit the kill to 130 wolves.

The decision comes amid national scrutiny of how Wisconsin officials are managing the state’s gray wolves (Canis lupus), which until January were protected under the federal Endangered Species Act. The following month, hunters killed 218 wolves in 3 days—an estimated 20% of the state’s wolf population—during a permitted hunt, even though officials had capped the legal kill at 119 animals. Since then, researchers believe poachers have killed more wolves. The string of events has helped create substantial uncertainty about the size of the state’s wolf population, previously estimated at about 1000 animals, prompting some scientists to urge officials to permit hunters to kill just a small number of wolves in the upcoming hunt—or none at all.

The natural resources board, made up of political appointees, ignored those pleas. And it brushed aside a lower quota recommended by a state Wolf Harvest Advisory Committee, made up of biologists, hunters, wolf advocates, and tribal members.

The U.S. Senate yesterday passed legislation that calls for spending $1 trillion—including $550 billion in new funds—on improving the nation’s infrastructure. Most of the funding will go to upgrading transportation, water, and power infrastructure, as well as expanding broadband internet access. But the bill also includes some money for R&D, primarily for advancing clean energy technologies, including electric vehicles and efforts to trap carbon dioxide produced by power plants before it enters the atmosphere.

Passage of the Senate bill—on a bipartisan 69 to 30 vote—marks a major political victory for President Joe Biden. Still, the bill is far smaller than the $2.6 trillion version the White House originally proposed, and it does not include some $600 billion that Biden originally wanted to spend on R&D and related initiatives, including efforts to combat climate change. The bill now goes to the House of Representatives, where some Democratic legislators say they will try to restore some of those climate-related programs, as well as other spending provisions. That’s a politically risky move, however, because it could cause some of the 19 Republican Senators who now support the bill to withdraw their backing of any final product.

ScienceInsider spoke with David Hart, a science policy expert at George Mason University who has been closely following the bill, about its research-related provisions. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

PHILADELPHIA—The main door of Sunny Shin’s lab is plastered with pictures of happier times: Shin photoshopped onto the cover of a Wheaties box, grad students chomping on corn cobs, a group photo on the lawn of a beach house. “We used to do a yearly retreat to the Jersey Shore,” says Shin, a midcareer microbial immunologist here at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn). “Hopefully we can go back in 2022.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Shin oversaw 12 people: seven Ph.D. students, three postdocs, an undergrad, and a lab manager. She was thinking about each of them when the memo came down from an administrator in mid-March 2020: All non–COVID-19 work must stop, and most rodents must be culled because few people would be around to care for them. “It was heartbreaking,” Shin said at the time, as her lab manager began the agonizing task of euthanizing 200 mice, some with unique genomes that had taken years to breed.

Shin was concerned for the future of her research on Legionnaires’ disease—and, more importantly, for the future of her people. “I worry that the pandemic will affect the career trajectories of junior scientists for years to come,” she says.

The Department of Energy (DOE) will soon wipe away a legacy of Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist who served as secretary of energy from 2009 to 2013 under former President Barack Obama. According to the department’s budget request for next year, DOE intends to wind down most of its Energy Innovation Hubs, multidisciplinary, multi-institutional centers that Chu devised to solve crucial energy-related problems and invigorate the sclerotic department.

Chu compared the hubs to the Manhattan Project, the World War II scramble to make an atomic bomb, and like the bomb project, they were meant to be ad hoc, temporary efforts. Some DOE bureaucrats disliked the way the hubs crossed organizational boundaries, but observers say they succeeded in making DOE’s research more responsive and relevant. “The vision for the hub was, and still is, a great one,” says Eric Isaacs, president of the Carnegie Institution for Science and former director of DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory. In fact, DOE appears to have embraced the once-controversial model and has started several new projects that hew to it. “They look like a hub, and they walk like a hub, but they don’t have this unfortunate malodorous name,” says Alex King, a materials scientist retired from DOE’s Ames Laboratory.

Chu, a former president of AAAS, which publishes Science, borrowed the basic parameters for the hubs from three bioenergy research centers started by DOE under former President George W. Bush. Each hub would receive $25 million a year for 5 years, with the possibility of a renewal. Instead of focusing on a research topic, each would strive to develop a practical solution for a single big problem, Chu said, uniting “under one roof” everybody from scientists doing basic research to engineers developing a prototype. By 2013, DOE had initiated five hubs focused on challenges ranging from converting sunlight to fuel to modeling nuclear reactors to improve their performance.

When Yves Moreau, a bioinformatician at KU Leuven in Belgium, noticed a 2017 paper in Human Genetics that described the “male genetic landscape of China” based on a set of almost 38,000 Y-STR sequences, he saw a red flag. Y-STR stands for Y-chromosomal short tandem repeat polymorphism, bits of repetitive DNA often used in forensic investigations. Some of the samples came from Uyghurs and other minorities in China, and Moreau was skeptical that they had given informed consent for the use of their genetic data or understood that China might use it to profile their people. In June 2020, he asked the journal’s editors to retract the “indefensible” paper.

Springer Nature, its publisher, launched an investigation that is still ongoing. So last month, Moreau stepped up the pressure: He wrote to the journal’s entire editorial board to complain about the lack of progress. For Moreau, the paper is just one of many studies, primarily in forensic genetics, that deserve scrutiny because of consent problems in China and the potential for abuse of the data. He says he has flagged about 28 papers at six journals over the past couple of years.

And his campaign is gaining traction. Eight of 25 members of the editorial board of Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine, published by Wiley, recently resigned to protest the lack of progress in investigating a number of papers flagged by Moreau, as The Intercept reported last week. A former editor-in-chief of Human Genetics, geneticist Robert Nussbaum, has added his voice to Moreau’s, complaining to the editors that the investigation of the 2017 paper “seems to have been going on a long time.” Springer Nature’s executive editor for medicine and life sciences, Andrea Pillmann, says it is investigating about 50 other papers, 29 of which already have an editor’s note of concern attached to them. The company has put checks in place “to help us to identify potentially concerning submissions in future,” Pillmann says. Meanwhile, the Charité University Hospital in Berlin has come under fire for hosting the genetic database used in several papers under investigation.

The hundreds of climate experts who compiled the mammoth new climate report released today by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had to work under unprecedented pandemic conditions. At vast meetings forced online, scientists wrestled with how to convey the extent of the global crisis and the urgent need to act. It was uncanny to see “the echoes of one crisis in another,” says Claudia Tebaldi, a climate scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and one of the authors of the report.

The report paints an alarming picture but emphasizes there is still time for swift action to mitigate the worst of the projected impacts of climate change. Current average warming is now estimated at 1.1°C compared to preindustrial records, a revision based on improved methods and data that adds 0.1°C to previous estimates. Under every emissions scenario explored by the report, average warming of 1.5°C—a major target of the Paris climate accord—will very likely be reached within the next 20 years.

That timetable “underscores a sense of urgency for immediate and decisive action by every country, especially the major economies,” says Jane Lubchenco, deputy director for climate and the environment at the White House ​Office of Science and Technology Policy. “This is a critical decade for keeping the 1.5°C target within reach.” And the projections mean countries should come to the United Nations Climate Change Conference, scheduled for November, with the most “aggressive, ambitious” targets possible, she says.

Novavax, the small, Maryland-based company that has been struggling for months to bring its promising protein-based COVID-19 vaccine to market, announced a setback yesterday in its quest for an emergency use authorization (EUA) in the United States, sending its share prices tumbling today. The U.S. government has ordered Novavax to stop making vaccine in the United States and said it will offer the company no more manufacturing funding until it passes muster with the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) strict manufacturing requirements, such as ensuring each lot of vaccine has the same potency.

“The U.S. government has recently instructed [us] to prioritize alignment” with FDA’s methods for ensuring consistency in manufacturing, the company wrote in a quarterly report filed yesterday. The government “further indicated that [it] will not fund additional US manufacturing” until the firm has done so.  

Meeting FDA’s testing requirements “is just taking time. This interaction with [the U.S. government] is part of the normal course of business,” company spokesperson Amy Speak wrote in an email to ScienceInsider today. “We are continuing to work with the FDA and the US Government to finalize our filing package for EUA as rapidly as possible.”