Plans to drill Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge have underestimated the effects of climate change, one arm of the Interior department is warning another.
The Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) pointed to several aspects of climate change that were minimized or absent in the Bureau of Land Management's (BLM’s) draft environmental impact statement (EIS). In some cases, the service corrected BLM characterizations of climate research.
Facebook’s newest fact checking partner is connected to an enterprise that was founded by a conservative Fox News host and that routinely promotes climate doubt.
The social media giant is partnering with CheckYourFact.com to provide third-party oversight of news on its platform, Facebook announced last week. Check Your Fact is an affiliate of The Daily Caller, the right-leaning news outlet co-founded by Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
A European funder has taken action against U.K. researchers in advance of Brexit.
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The prospect of Brexit, the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union, has loomed long and large over researchers, but the effects on funding, so far, have been speculative. Now, a European funding agency has made a pre-emptive strike in advance of Brexit, changing a policy that directly impacts grants in the United Kingdom. The European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Association, in Brussels, is requiring that U.K. grant holders shift financial administration to a partner in Europe by 1 May.
COST says the change will prevent disruption if Brexit occurs without a deal to smooth the transition, and that it does not affect participation by U.K. scientists. But U.K. grant holders say the policy change is premature, disruptive to research—and in at least one case it has led to a staff layoff. “The bureaucratic nightmare of moving these grants is pretty horrendous,” says Nic Walton, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
COST hands out about €33 million per year in grants designed to stimulate and expand research networks. The 4-year grants, each about €500,000, typically include dozens of partners in Europe and elsewhere. The funding covers travel to workshops, training, and other outreach and networking events. Often, the events lead to larger collaborative research proposals, says Stefan Bouzarovski, a geographer at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, who chairs a network on improving access to household energy with more than 200 members in 40 countries.
The Department of Defense has been Jason’s sponsor from the start.
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Hope is fading that the U.S. government will extend a 30 April cutoff date for federal agencies to hire the 60-year-old Jason study group for independent, technical advice on national security issues. A meeting this weekend to plan a baker’s dozen of summer studies could instead be the group’s swan song.
“There is a very real chance that the Jason advisory group will effectively be disbanded shortly after the spring meeting, under circumstances that will make its recovery unlikely,” says Ellen Williams, vice chair of Jason, speaking on behalf of the group’s steering committee. “This is despite the indication of intent at high levels across the U.S. government to resolve the present situation by extending the Jason contract for 1 year.”
“An extension would allow the studies requested by numerous government agencies for the summer of 2019 to be delivered,” notes Williams, a professor at the University of Maryland in College Park. “And it would allow for orderly planning and transition to a new government sponsor.”
At a meeting last week, Anna Verghese, director of the Audacious Project, and Chris Anderson, head of the TED group, detailed the fundraising success so far for eight ambitious projects, several of them focused on science.
The TED organization, whose slick online video presentations have helped thousands of scientists and other thinkers reach huge audiences and potential financial backers, has jumped into the funding business itself. Last week, TED’s Audacious Project announced its second cohort of grantees, who will each receive tens of millions of dollars from donors. Among them are teams working to design improved proteins, eradicate parasitic diseases, and develop plants that counter global warming.
David Johnson, a sociologist who studies trends in scientific funding at the University of Nevada in Reno, compares TED’s funding strategy to stock market investing. “In investment portfolio terms, federal agencies like the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health are like [an] index fund with diversified investment in science [whereas] Audacious is taking it to an extreme by making major investments in a few blue-chip scientific stocks.”
This second funding round began when the organization put out a call for proposals, asking for just a few hundred words describing an idea and its scope. It received about 1500 initial applications. Officials within TED worked with a philanthropic consultancy called the Bridgespan Group in Boston to narrow that batch to a short list.
The quake is tiny, so small that it would never be detected on Earth amid the background thrum of waves and wind. But Mars is dead quiet, allowing the lander’s sensitive seismometer to pick up the signal, which resembles similar surface ripples detected traveling through the moon’s surface after moonquakes. The quake is so small that scientists were unable to detect any waves tied to it that passed through the martian interior, defying efforts to estimate its exact location and strength, says Philippe Lognonné, a planetary seismologist at Paris Diderot University who leads the mission’s seismometer experiment. Still, it was gratifying to observe, he says. “It is the first quake. All the time, we were waiting for this.”
The detection is a milestone for the $816 million lander, kicking off a new field of “martian seismology,” added Bruce Banerdt, InSight’s principal investigator and a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, in a news release. It proves Mars is seismologically active, and marks NASA’s return to planetary seismology after more than 4 decades. The mission is intended to peer through the planet’s rust-colored shell, gauging the thickness and composition of its crust, mantle, and core. But while on Earth, the lander was plagued by delay and cost overruns; since landing on Mars in a sand-filled hollow, the lander’s second instrument, a heat probe, got stuck soon after it began to burrow into the surface.
Administrators at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, yesterday tried to reassure alarmed employees that its recent dismissals of faculty members alleged to have broken federal funding rules were not connected to race or ethnicity.
“I can assure you 100% that this is not based on ethnicity,” Stephen Hahn, chief medical executive at the institution, told a group of MD Anderson employees who attended a town hall meeting Monday morning. “This is something that we abhor and that we would never do,” he said, according to an audio recording obtained by ScienceInsider.
MD Anderson administrators called the meeting after Science and the Houston Chronicle last week reported that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had asked the cancer center to investigate possible rule violations by at least five of its scientists, including failing to protect the confidentiality of peer review and failing to report foreign funding and business ties. In particular, NIH raised concerns about ties to funding programs and institutions in China.
Fully three in four U.S. undergraduate women majoring in physics reported being sexually harassed over a 2-year period ending in 2017, according to a new paper in Physical Review Physics Education Research.
That year, scholars surveyed more than 450 undergraduate women attending conferences sponsored by the American Physical Society. They represented a significant chunk of female physics undergraduates, considering that in 2015—the most recent year for which data are available—1349 women received bachelor’s degrees in physics.
Questioned about specific forms of harassment, 68% reported experiencing sexist remarks such as “women aren’t as good at physics” or being treated differently, ignored, or put down because of their gender. Fifty-one percent said they endured sexual jokes; were the object of sexual remarks about their bodies, appearance, or clothing; or had their sexual activity discussed. And 24% reported receiving unwanted sexual attention.
HOUSTON, TEXAS—The MD Anderson Cancer Center here has ousted three senior researchers after the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, informed it that the scientists had committed potentially “serious” violations of agency rules involving confidentiality of peer review and the disclosure of foreign ties. The researchers are among five MD Anderson scientists that NIH cited in letters to the cancer center, which is part of the University of Texas (UT) system. MD Anderson officials say they invoked termination proceedings against three of the researchers, are still investigating allegations against one, and determined termination was not warranted for the fifth scientist.
The new developments are linked to a sweeping effort launched last year by NIH to address growing U.S. government fears that foreign nations, particularly China, are taking unfair advantage of federally funded research. NIH says its inquiries about the foreign ties of specific NIH-funded researchers have prompted at least 55 institutions to launch investigations. The cases at MD Anderson, which received $148 million in NIH funding in 2018, are the first publicly known instances where NIH’s inquiries appear to have led an institution to invoke termination proceedings against researchers judged to have violated the rules.
Cancer center officials have not named any of the five researchers. MD Anderson President Peter Pisters says all are “Asian”; Science has confirmed that three are ethnically Chinese. Several faced NIH inquiries about their ties to China, according to internal cancer center documents and NIH emails provided by MD Anderson to the Houston Chronicle and reviewed by Science. Those documents also show that MD Anderson has been working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for several years on undisclosed national security investigations, which included searches of faculty email accounts and in one instance, video surveillance. Those investigations could be linked to the recent departures and to the NIH letters; MD Anderson had put at least one faculty member named by NIH on leave in December 2017, months before NIH sent its letter and 1 week after FBI gained access to several MD Anderson network accounts.
The Society for American Archaeology (SAA) continues to battle fallout for the way it handled a #MeToo scandal at its annual meeting last week. The organization faced a firestorm of criticism on social media for not immediately ejecting an alleged harasser from the meeting after being informed about his presence and a university investigation that found accusations against him credible. Today, as archaeologists continued to vent at their own society, it published an open letter and video from President Joe Watkins personally apologizing for not taking action and laying out actions SAA will take, including updating its sexual harassment policy and providing training to staff on its “effective and compassionate implementation.”
“Finally, the start of a sincere response from the SAA,” tweeted Stephanie Halmhofer, a cultural resources management archaeologist with In Situ Archaeological Consulting in Roberts Creek, Canada. But it remains to be seen whether the latest apology will be enough to staunch the flow of archaeologists pledging to leave SAA. Meanwhile, other societies have announced plans to revamp their harassment policies to handle similar situations.
Two days ago, SAA apologized for “the impact, stress, and fear the situation caused to victims of sexual harassment within our field,” as well as for its own delay in issuing an apology. But on 17 April, it published a controversial timeline of events that sparked another social media row.
