For many first-time congressional candidates with science and technology backgrounds, fundraising can be a major obstacle. Not to Brian Forde, who was once a  senior technology adviser to former-President Barack Obama. Forde managed to outpace his Democrat rivals by raising some $1.5 million for his southern California House race, including more than $300,000 in contributions via cryptocurrencies.

But on 5 June Forde received only 6% of the vote, leaving him a distant fourth in the open, top-two primary to represent California’s 45th congressional district in Orange County. Democrat Katie Porter, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), edged out fellow UCI law professor Dave Min for the right to challenge incumbent Republican Mimi Walters in the November general election.

The 38-year-old Democrat stands by his message that Congress needs more technologists to do its job. Exhibit A, he says, are all the legislators who struggled to keep up with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg when he testified this spring. But the knowledge gained from a tech career that gave him the chance to brief Obama on the emerging world of cryptocurrencies—and then to create a digital currency initiative within the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge—wasn’t nearly enough to win a seat in Congress. Political smarts are even more important, he acknowledges.

Forde spoke with ScienceInsider both before and after his defeat, offering some advice to scientists weighing their own bids for elective office and reflecting on his own campaign.

It’s summer in Washington, D.C., and the irony is in full flower. Yesterday, the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources held a confirmation hearing for the White House’s nominees to head various parts of the Department of Energy (DOE), including Christopher Fall, who would lead DOE’s $6.26 billion Office of Science, and Daniel Simmons, who would lead DOE's $2.32 billion applied research program in energy efficiency and renewable energy (EERE). Democratic committee members fretted that, ironically, Simmons had previously been a vice president at a think tank that called for eliminating EERE. Perhaps more ironically, EERE could cease to exist in a reorganization of the federal government proposed by the White House last week.

The committee also put questions to Teri Donaldson, the nominee to be DOE's inspector general, and Karen Evans, the nominee for the new position of DOE's assistant secretary of cybersecurity, energy security, and emergency response.

Fall, the nominee for director of the Office of Science, earned a doctorate in neuroscience but has spent the past 8 years in Washington, D.C., working in science policy, starting at the Office of Naval Research. During that time, he spent 3 years at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He is currently acting head of DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), a $353 million agency whose goal is to help quickly translate ideas from DOE’s basic research into budding technologies. “ARPA-E might be the coolest job I've ever had,” Fall told the committee.

Stung by years of criticism that its journal impact factors have distorted scholarly publishing, the private firm Clarivate Analytics based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, this week rolled out an updated version of its Journal Citation Reports database that it says provides context useful to understanding journals’ characteristics and audiences.

Impact factors—which represent the number of citations to a journal's articles divided by the number of articles published during a 2-year period—are widely used in academe as a yardstick of a journal’s prestige and reach. But the metric has plenty of critics. The rap includes worries that editors can too easily boost their journal’s ranking through a variety of strategies, and that impact factors are misleading—a few highly cited papers can drive much of a journal’s overall impact factor.

Although Clarivate—which has offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and China—continues to publish journal impact factors in its Journal Citation Review (JCR) database, the latest version, released 26 June, contains supplementary information that addresses some of this criticism. Most prominently, the page showing a journal’s impact factor now includes a distribution curve displaying the total number of articles and other items published in a journal versus the number of times each item was cited. The median number of citations for all of the journal’s research articles and review articles is also identified on the curve.

Yet again, NASA is delaying the launch of its flagship astrophysics mission, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), to 30 March 2021—the third schedule slip in less than a year. An independent review of the project concluded that there was excessive optimism in the launch schedule and suggested the delay, one of 32 recommendations to improve the project’s chances of success. NASA also revealed that the development cost of the telescope would rise from $8 billion to $8.8 billion, requiring it to be reauthorized by Congress, which set an $8 billion cap in 2011. (The total cost of JWST, including operations, is expected to be $9.66 billion.)

NASA was responding to the report of an Independent Review Board (IRB), headed by agency veteran Thomas Young. The board’s report highlighted a series of human errors and embedded problems in the hardware as the main drivers of the delay. Young told a press briefing today that because of the mission’s “awesome scientific potential” it was worth pursuing it to completion. Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA’s science mission directorate in Washington, D.C., says, “We have to get this right on the ground before we go into space.”

Young says JWST’s hardware includes seven noteworthy firsts for which NASA had no heritage. But most of the problems that led to his recommended delay were avoidable, he says. Human errors in the testing and integration of the spacecraft and its sunshield were responsible for many of them, including the use of an incorrect solvent in fuel valves and faulty fasteners which keep the sunshield folded up during its trip into space. During acoustic testing some of those fasteners broke loose and it took months to find and remove the pieces from the spacecraft. These problems had “simple fixes,” Young said, but caused a delay of up to 1.5 years.

SAGAMIHARA, JAPAN—After 3.5 years traveling 3.2 billion kilometers through space, Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft officially arrived at the asteroid it will land on later this year to pick up surface and subsurface soil and rock samples and—hopefully—return them to Earth for analysis. The findings are expected to shed light on the materials that existed in the early solar system and the formation and evolution of planets and their arrangement. They might provide evidence for the theory that asteroids and comets are one source of Earth’s water and its amino acids—the building blocks of life.

The ground crew in Japan confirmed this morning that Hayabusa2, launched in December 2014, reached its home position 20 kilometers away from Ryugu, an asteroid in orbit between Earth and Mars. With the spacecraft now at its target, “I’m just really happy,” Yuichi Tsuda, project manager for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Institute for Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) in Sagamihara, told a packed press conference on the ISAS campus this afternoon.

For the next 18 months, this second edition of Hayabusa, Japanese for peregrine falcon, will be maneuvering around the asteroid, while a suite of instruments map it; measure its mass, density, and gravity; determine its mineral and elemental composition; and scout out landing sites. The first of a series of touchdowns is scheduled for October. In addition to gathering surface soil samples, Hayabusa2 will release a German-French rover called MASCOT that will hop across the surface, using its four instruments to analyze soil samples in situ.

The Karolinska Institute (KI) in Stockholm has finally, officially, found disgraced surgeon Paolo Macchiarini guilty of scientific misconduct. Macchiarini was widely hailed as a pioneer in regenerative medicine for his technique of implanting artificial tracheae seeded with a patient’s own stem cells into patients, but KI fired him in 2016 amid allegations of fraud and other types of misconduct.

However, the verdict is a bitter pill for the four people who raised the alarm about Macchiarini’s fraud. In a report issued yesterday, KI President Ole Petter Ottersen finds one of them, Karl-Henrik Grinnemo, a surgeon and stem cell researcher at KI and Uppsala University in Sweden, guilty of misconduct as well, based on his involvement in a paper he and others co-authored with Macchiarini in The Lancet in 2011. And the report says two others are “blameworthy” for their roles in a 2013 paper in Biomaterials that describes data from a patient for whom there was no ethical approval in place.

“This sends the message that whistleblowers in research will be punished. That’s a serious problem for research,” says cardiothoracic surgeon Oscar Simonson, one of the whistleblowers, who now works at Uppsala University Hospital. He and his colleagues “spent thousands of hours over 5 years” uncovering and documenting the problems with Macchiarini’s research and the papers in question. (The report says Simonson is “blameworthy,” but not responsible for misconduct for his role in the 2013 paper.) 

A U.S. Senate appropriations subcommittee today approved a spending bill that calls for giving the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, a $2 billion, 5.4% increase to $39.1 billion in the 2019 fiscal year that begins 1 October.

The bill, which will be voted on by the full Senate appropriations panel later this week, arrives just weeks after a House of Representatives spending panel proposed a $1.25 billion raise. The House and Senate numbers are well above President Donald Trump's $34.2 billion budget request for NIH. The numbers suggest the agency is headed for another strong year in the budget process; Congress has approved hefty increases for NIH in each of the past few years.

The Senate bill calls for increasing NIH's spending on Alzheimer's disease research by $425 million, to $2.34 billion.

Originally published by E&E News

A federal court judge yesterday threw out lawsuits from two California cities seeking to make oil companies pay for worsening sea-level rise and other climate change impacts.

Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted the request from five oil companies seeking dismissal of the cases brought by San Francisco and Oakland. They were suing Chevron Corp., BP PLC, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell PLC, arguing that the companies make and sell products that when combusted create a public nuisance. The cities also contended that the companies knew the global dangers for decades and hid that information while protecting their assets.

Originally published by E&E News

While the public and the media focus on Scott Pruitt's ethics scandals, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) boss is quietly advancing a regulatory overhaul that could have profound implications for air quality standards.

The agency earlier this month published the draft plan, titled "Increasing Consistency and Transparency in Considering Costs and Benefits in the Rulemaking Process."

President Donald Trump today proposed reorganizing parts of the federal government in ways that should sound very familiar to those who follow U.S. science policy. In fact, many of the ideas that would impact the research community have been floated by previous administrations—Democratic as well as Republican—and some are less bold than what his predecessors had hoped to achieve.

Of course, the fact that they appear in the 132-page document unveiled this afternoon by the White House also means they were never embraced by Congress and did not go into effect. And many observers doubt Trump will fare much better in realizing his proposed changes than his predecessors.

The plan, labeled “Delivering Government Solutions in the 21st Century,” would affect federal research agencies in ways great and small. Here are highlights from that document, along with some background and preliminary reactions from the communities most affected.