STEM EDUCATION
President Obama hosts first annual White House Science Fair
Over 100 students and their science projects packed into the White House this week to participate at the super bowl of young student science fairs. The need to graduate more students with STEM degrees is at the forefront of the President’s agenda.

STEM EDUCATION
President Obama calls for investment and new approach to science education
President Obama said his upcoming budget proposal, set to be released next week, would include a request for $80 million from Congress for a new Education Department competition to support math and science teacher preparation programs.

BIOETHICS
New book frames evolving ethics of DNA databases
The new book by Dr. Bernice Elger, “Ethical Issues of Human Genetic Databases: A Challenge to Classical Health Research Ethics?” brings in-depth research and intense application of bioethics to the uses of DNA databases. Going over the history and current legal framework, this volume will be a staple on the ethics debate for some time to come.

SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY
India brings charges under its “Biodiversity Act” against Monsanto for “bio-piracy”
India is charging the American company Monsanto for “bio-piracy” due to the alleged theft of indigenous eggplant varietal. There was controversy in 2009 over the genetically modified crop’s potential safety. Now, farmers with the backing of the Indian Government argue that the strain which conventionally developed over centuries has been stolen from them and modified.

CLEAN TECH
California’s green economy jobs more secure in recession
The clean economy sector in California lost only 3 percent of jobs compared to the overall 7 percent of jobs in the state of California in the great recession. Showing higher resilience to recession, it looks like green is fast becoming not just a more ethically sound investment but a safe investment.

DIVERSITY IN SCIENCE
Brainstorming on diversity in Science
The NIH has an open forum for comments from scientists on how they could increase diversity. From stronger mentoring programs to education about funding opportunities, NIH wants to know how to reach out to under-represented minorities.

CLIMATE SCIENCE
Malaria affected footprint to shift
A new study predicts that climate change will change the ranges of malaria carrying mosquitoes. A new “high-resolution” model shows the malarial zone shifting from the tropical parts of Africa into the sub-Saharan Sahel and East Africa, two of the poorest geographical locations on Earth.

STEM CELLS
Department of Defense stem cell investment may return big for soldiers suffering from severe bone fractures
Dr. Steve Stice and Dr. John Peroni of the University of Georgia Regenerative Bioscience Center used stem cells to develop a “fracture putty” that shows promise for speeding the healing of bones from weeks to days. The DoD grant of $1.4 million focuses on the men and women of the Armed Forces who have suffered severe fractures, allowing treatment of types of fractures for which current prognoses call for amputation.

BIOCOMPUTING
DNA used to process, store and render image data
Scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in California and the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology demonstrate the potential of “biological computing,” by using DNA in a “well-defined” chemical process to render and store their own institutional logos.

EVOLUTION
The animal world just got a lot older
A team of international researchers have discovered the oldest remains of an animal in Namibia. The sponge fossils have been dated to an age of about 760 million years, closing a gap that geneticist had theorized long before. Previously the oldest animal fossil was dated to be 650 million years old.

ENERGY
USDA Funds Two Renewable Energy Programs
The USDA’s first Repowering Assistance Program made available $25 million to “provide a financial incentive to biorefineries to use renewable biomass in place of fossil fuels used to produce heat or power.” Payments will be made to producers of so called “advanced” biofuels, such as cellulose, sugar and starch, crop residue, vegetative waste material, animal waste, food and yard waste, vegetable oil, animal fat, and biogas.

This week’s news compiled by Science Progress intern Jason Thomas.

GEOLOGY AND ENERGY
There’s Much Less Shale Gas Available in US Than Previously Thought
Natural gas industrialists and members of Congress from both sides of the aisle have been citing the vast supply of natural gas recently discovered in the United states as a reason to continue investing in fossil fuel based energy. A new study from the non-partisan Energy Information Agency however could put a damper on that message.

INTERNET PRIVACY
Here’s Google’s Response to Your Privacy Anger
Google writes a letter to Congress to do damage control after its abrupt announcement about consolidating personal information spooked internet users around the world.

STEM CELLS
Crystal ball gazing: human embryonic stem cells in 2012
BioNews gives a roundup of human embryonic stem cell research in 2011, and speculates about the new developments to come in 2012.

SCIENCE COMMUNICATION
Study explains why it’s useless to argue with climate deniers
It’s not that climate deniers, birthers, and 9/11 “insider jobers” are ignorant to the facts, they just don’t trust you or the authority your information came from, according to a Kent University study of the psychology of conspiracy theorists.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
North Carolina launches FCC-approved TV White Space network in Wilmington
A wired internet connection may soon become a thing of the past. The town of Wilmington, North Carolina recently became the first city in the country to put unused TV frequencies to use to distribute long distance wireless internet services. Developers hope that this demonstration test of commercial TV White Space, or TVWS, will be just the beginning of a multi-billion dollar wireless internet market transformation.

EVOLUTION
Evolution in Action: Study Finds Virus to Be Fast Learner
In a new study published on Thursday in the journal Science, a team of scientists at Michigan State University describes how viruses evolved a new way of infecting cells amazingly quickly—in less than 2 weeks. The lambda virus showed just how powerful the force of natural selection can be by overcoming one in a thousand trillion trillion (1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) odds to successfully evolve to infect a new kind of host in 25 percent of experiments.

GREEN TECHNOLOGY
Chevrolet pioneers Ecologic auto environmental label
It seems that green conscious products sell, and Chevy is betting the trend will continue by labeling its new vehicles with “ecologic” environmental labels. The new 2012 Chevrolet Sonic will roll out with the new label touting its environmental benefits.

CLIMATE SCIENCE
Extreme droughts could increase by 15 percent in Spain by the middle of the century
New methodology developed by Polytechnic University of Cartagena to track and predict drought conditions projects a 15 percent increase in climate change induced drought in Spain by mid-century. With water reserves already low, an increase in drought of that scale gives farmers and the people they feed much to worry about.

NUCLEAR ENERGY
After the nuclear disaster, Japan considers a green future
Following the 9.0 earthquake, devastating tsunami, and nuclear meltdown that ravaged Japan last year, the nation is beginning to rebuild under the slogan “build back better.” This will mean a comprehensive approach to sustainability, as well as a possible phasing out of nuclear in favor of renewable energy.

NUCLEAR ENERGY
Department of Energy Soliciting Proposals for manufacture of small scale, modular nuclear reactors
The DOE issued a Funding Opportunity Announcement, or FOA, for two grants worth $452 million over five years to fund research and deployment of Small Modular Reactors, or SMRs. The goal is to deploy the new technology by 2022 with the grant process considering the ability to implement the SMR’s earlier more favorably.

INVESTING IN SCIENCE
President Obama calls for sustained investment in research
The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology supports President Obama’s call sustained investment and his “federal commitment to research.” When it comes to tightening the federal belt, cutting investments in research for the biomedical sciences works against job creation.

This week’s news compiled by Science Progress intern Jason Thomas.

• Rewiring the Federal Government for Competitiveness by Jonathan Sallet and Sean Pool
• Universities in Innovation Networks by Krisztina “Z” Holly
• Building a Technically Skilled Workforce by Louis Soares and Stephen Steigleder
• Economic Intelligence by Andrew Reamer
• Immigration for Innovation by Marshall Fitz.

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Innovation is and always has been the engine that drives economic growth in the United States. Economists believe that innovation—new technologies, products, processes, and the industries they create—is responsible for between half and 80 percent of all economic growth.

Indeed, U.S. companies and industries, with the help of federally funded research, have invented many things that the world wants to buy—think light bulbs, assembly line automobile production, computers, Internet applications, handheld wireless devices, photovoltaic solar cells, Global Positioning System satellites, and the list goes on. This innovative spirit of the American people, protected by the rule of law, keeps us in the world’s top position in innovation, and subsequently ensures we are home to the world’s best-paying jobs and highest standards of living.

But in the 21st century our lead is beginning to erode. It’s not that we’ve started doing anything wrong—we are still home to the world’s most productive workers and innovative companies. Rather, it is because others have followed in our footsteps, and in some cases gone even further to invest specifically in the interrelated building blocks of a high-performance innovation engine. Across a spectrum of metrics—from education and workforce readiness, to research and development, to manufacturing, to infrastructure—our nation’s competitive position is slipping relative to other countries that are investing more in the driver of economic growth and prosperity. This slippage costs us jobs, investment, and wage growth.

In response to these emerging challenges, Congress reauthorized the America COMPETES Act in January 2010. The law is a crucial piece of legislation that ensures investments in the building blocks of innovation and competitiveness: research, education, infrastructure, manufacturing, and innovation networks.

But realizing that the COMPETES Act is only a stopgap measure, Congress also asked the secretary of commerce to complete two important studies of our national innovation capacity and economic competitiveness. The first, released earlier this month by Commerce Secretary John Bryson at an event at the Center for American Progress, was a comprehensive analysis of the competitive position of the U.S. innovation system. The second, due in January of 2012, will outline a 10-year strategic plan to give our national innovation engine a major tuneup.

The Center for American Progress applauds this action by the federal government. But we as a nation need to move faster. That’s why two CAP teams, one from Science Progress and the other from the Doing What Works project, convened a taskforce in early 2011 comprised of innovation policy experts to assess these same issues in tandem. This taskforce identified six key areas where policy barriers inhibit innovation and hold back national competitiveness:

• The structure of federal programs itself is out of date and thus unable to respond strategically to the innovation challenges of the increasingly competitive 21st century global economy.
• Federal data and statistical systems are not optimized to gather key 21st century innovation metrics. What isn’t measured, isn’t managed.
• The U.S. workforce development system does not adequately connect students and working learners to the needs of innovation-intensive industries on the cutting edge of the global economy.
• Federal research and development efforts are not optimized to make the most of basic and applied research occurring in universities in communities across the country.
• The U.S. immigration system needs to reform to ensure that talented foreign-born workers with bright ideas can start business and help contribute to innovation and job creation.
• Better policies are needed to strengthen the vital link between U.S. manufacturing and technical innovation capacity.

These six areas form the basis for the Center’s Series on U.S. Science, Innovation, and Economic Competitiveness. Each report in the series focuses on a different building block of our national competitiveness.

In “Rewiring the Federal Government for Competitiveness,” Science Progress advisor and former Commerce Department official Jonathan Sallet and Science Progress Managing Editor Sean Pool identify areas where existing federal programs and services could be coordinated more strategically to promote innovation and competitiveness. Specifically, the paper identifies four key competitiveness areas where the splintered nature of existing programs and policymaking inhibits national competitiveness priorities:

• Trade
• Technology
• Workforce training
• Economic development

The paper proposed that the Department of Commerce become a more robust “Department of Competitiveness,” absorbing several other government agencies and programs to ensure the federal government supports innovation and economic growth more effectively and efficiently across these four competitive arenas. Importantly, the paper presents a “common application” program that would allow for more strategic coordination between the federal government, state and local governments, businesses, universities, and regional economic development players.

The second report, “Economic Intelligence,” by Professor Andrew Reamer, addresses the federal data system that is so important to policymaking. Any national competitiveness strategy must be guided by good data and metrics. Reamer’s paper finds that the current public statistics system leaves both the government and the private sector in the dark about key drivers of innovation and competitiveness, inhibiting our ability to manage and maximize these important economic forces. He proposes four pragmatic and targeted reforms that would:

• Improve competitive analysis in U.S. traded industries—the ones on the front lines of global competition
• Better measure intermediate outcomes of innovation, such as rates of entrepreneurship, invention, and network formation
• Conduct factor analysis structural building blocks of innovation—workforce capacity, R&D, financial capital, physical infrastructure, and clusters
• Directly evaluate the impact of public-sector innovation programs

These reforms are designed to empower not only the government but also technology companies, manufacturers, exporters, entrepreneurs, students, research institutions, and workforce training organizations to make smarter decisions and stay on the cutting edge of innovation.

In “Building a Technically Skilled Workforce,” American Progress workforce experts Louis Soares and Stephen Steigleder address the shortage in our pipeline of middle-skill workers—such as welders, technicians, and nursing assistants—needed to meet the emerging demands of innovation-intensive industries including biotechnology, nanotechnology, clean energy, and advanced manufacturing. The authors find that the projected shortage of 5 million middle-skill technicians by 2018 will hamper the ability of our companies to get the human capital they need to stay on the cutting edge of innovation. To address this problem, they propose converting an existing federal grant program into a competitive Community College and Industry Partnership Grant designed to catalyze the development of new and better workforce training systems.

In “Universities and Innovation Networks,” Krisztina “Z” Holly brings her experience as University of Southern California Vice Provost for Innovation to bear looking at how federal policies affect the commercialization of university research. Universities are at the heart of our national innovation engine, and Holly identifies five areas for improvement of federal R&D policy to help get the most out of them:

• Increase investment in high-risk, large-scale, potentially transformative early stage research projects
• Help bridge the innovation gap between lab and marketplace with policies that promote small business spinouts and collaboration with cutting edge industries
• Refocus federal economic development funding on capacity building for place-based innovation ecosystems where spinout companies can thrive
• Develop a better infrastructure for measuring the impact of federally funded university research on human capital, jobs, and markets
• Address shifts in the increasingly competitive and hyper-collaborative global innovation landscape and reward “flows,” rather than “stocks” of information

These reforms would help tap the potential of universities to act as engines of innovation and job creation.

Marshall Fitz, in “Immigration for Innovation,” assesses the impact of high-skill immigration on our nation’s economic competitiveness and finds that high-skilled immigrants who have started their own high-tech companies have created hundreds of thousands of new jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars of economic activity. But our current immigration system stops many of the world’s best and brightest from starting companies and creating jobs in the United States, and inadequately safeguards against abuses that harm American-born workers. To stimulate innovation and enhance competitiveness, Fitz outlines reforms to target “job shops” that abuse the system, enhance worker mobility, and strengthen recruiting requirements, while establishing a market-based mechanism to set high-skill immigration rates to the economically optimal level.

Forthcoming in our series are several reports on the importance of manufacturing, particularly advanced manufacturing, to our nation’s continued global competitiveness. Each of these areas—federal program structure, metrics gathering, technical workforce development, university technology transfer, high-skill immigration, and manufacturing—represent key components of the innovation engine that drives long-term economic growth. Giving that engine a tuneup by implementing the policies in these papers is the first step to ensuring a prosperous and broadly shared economic future for all Americans.

Today we call upon the Obama administration and Congress to create a bipartisan commission to consider and then implement these kinds of reforms to our federal science and economic competitiveness programs. The new commission, modeled after the so-called Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission that enabled the Department of Defense to restructure our military bases so effectively, would be able to overcome congressional and executive branch inertia to retool our innovation engine for competitiveness in the 21st century.

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Download this report (pdf)

Download the introduction and summary (pdf)

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Investment in research and development is a significant driver of technological progress and economic growth, particularly in high-wage developed countries. The United States spends more than any other nation in the world on research and development, or R&D, but its relative position (measured by the share of such investment in national income) has been falling even as other countries increase their investments in research. In the United States, as in most other countries, business finances and carries out the majority of R&D activities.

Economic theory provides a strong justification for government support for R&D, including subsidies and incentives for business research. Without such support, companies are likely to underinvest in research (from the standpoint of the economy as a whole) because the results of R&D cannot be fully appropriated by the investing firm. Business accounts for a large and growing share of U.S. R&D spending, financing about two-thirds of the total in 2008, but business R&D as a share of U.S. gross domestic product has fallen behind the share in several other countries, including Japan and South Korea.

The U.S. government supports business R&D both through direct R&D funding, mostly dedicated to national-priority areas such as defense and health, and through tax incentives such as the research tax credit—the subject of this report. The United States was one of the first nations to provide tax incentives for business R&D, but many other countries have now introduced similar incentives, and many of their incentives are more generous. Tax incentives for business R&D have become an important tool used by countries to build their innovation capabilities and bolster their growth.

At the same time, business R&D investment is becoming more globalized. The large multinational companies headquartered in the United States, Europe, and Japan that account for more than 90 percent of business R&D worldwide are locating more of their R&D outside their home countries. Their location decisions are driven by many factors, including the growth of foreign markets, lower costs, the availability of foreign talent, and the tax and other incentives offered by foreign governments. Foreign investments in R&D by U.S. and other multinational companies are facilitating the development of R&D capabilities and the growth of high-technology industries in many emerging-market economies, particularly China.

Competition among nations to attract business R&D and to develop technology-intensive industries is growing. This challenges U.S. policymakers to strengthen policies that make the United States an attractive location for these activities. The most important of these tax incentives is the corporate research tax credit, formally known as the Research and Experimentation Tax Credit and also referred to by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service as the Credit for Increasing Research Activities. The goal of this corporate R&D tax credit is to encourage R&D investment by domestic and foreign firms alike by rewarding incremental, qualified research in the United States.

Broad federal corporate tax reform is now under discussion in Washington, including the appropriate role of tax expenditures—special features of the tax code to encourage specific activities with incentives such as the corporate R&D tax credit. This tax credit in particular is ripe for examination because it is one of the largest corporate tax expenditures in the federal budget, amounting to between $5 billion and $10 billion every year. The credit has, in fact, lapsed as of January 1, 2012, but Congress can reinstate it retroactively as it has done nine times previously.

There have been many careful empirical studies of the efficacy of the corporate R&D tax credit. Most studies find that the credit is effective in the sense that each dollar of foregone tax revenue causes businesses to invest at least an additional dollar in R&D. In other words, the credit stimulates at least as much R&D activity as a direct subsidy. And unlike a subsidy, which is usually linked to a particular kind of R&D related to a specific national goal, the credit allows businesses to select projects on the basis of the anticipated returns from incremental research dollars.

In this report, we examine the role of the credit in federal government support for R&D, evaluate the credit’s performance in realizing its objectives, and make recommendations to simplify, modify, and strengthen its effectiveness. Our recommendations fall into two broad categories:

• Measures to simplify the corporate R&D tax credit
  • Evaluate the revenue and incentive effects of replacing this credit, which isdesigned to apply only to incremental R&D spending by a company, with a similar credit that applies to the company’s full level of R&D spending.
  • Evaluate the revenue and incentive effects of replacing this credit with a “superdeduction” for R&D expenses or with an R&D jobs credit for the wages paid to R&D employees.
  • Replace the complex definition of qualified-research expenses eligible for this credit with the simpler definition of research expenses eligible for the research expense deduction.
  • If this credit is continued in its current form, then change the base period to a period in the more recent past, such as the most recent five years.
• Measures to strengthen the corporate R&D tax credit
  • Extend a simplified version of the tax credit for a period of 5 years to 10 years, during which the effectiveness of its new design can be assessed.
  • After this period, make the simplified tax credit permanent in order to increase its effectiveness.
  • Increase the tax credit by about 20 percent to keep it competitive with the tax incentives offered by other nations.
  • Provide small firms a larger and, in some cases, refundable version of the tax credit.
  • Drop the tax credit from the list of credits that are disallowed under the Alternative Minimum Tax.
  • Coordinate data gathering and assessments of the tax credit across agencies, making as much detail as possible available to independent researchers.

The report ends with a brief discussion of the implications of comprehensive corporate tax reform for the corporate R&D tax credit. Given the spillover benefits of R&D investment and the demonstrated effectiveness of the credit, we believe it should be preserved and strengthened as part of corporate tax reform. Otherwise, innovation and growth will languish in the United States as both U.S. and foreign companies locate more of their increasingly mobile R&D to countries offering more generous tax incentives.

Laura Tyson is the SK and Angela Chan Professor of Global Management at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Greg Linden is a research associate at the Institute for Business Innovation, a research unit at U.C. Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

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Download the introduction and summary (pdf)

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SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY
NASA releases long awaited Scientific Integrity Framework
NASA’s new guidelines implement the principles outlined in President Obama’s two Memoranda instructing agencies to develop unified scientific integrity guidelines. Science Progress’s commentary of the rest of the process is here.

SMALL BUSINESS INNOVATION
Critical Small Business Technology and Research Grant Programs Reauthorized
Today’s National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, which funds the military and other key technology programs across the government contained language long-sought after by innovation advocates to reauthorize and extend the Small Business Innovation and Research and Small Business Technology Transfer gran programs, both aimed at helping start up companies create jobs and commercialize new and innovative technology. See our analysis of this and a number of other recent moves to accelerate entrepreneurship and innovation here.

BIOETHICS
14 Senators Protest HHS’s Plan B Decision
Thirteen Democrats and one independent in the U.S. Senate are questioning last week’s announcement by Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius that she would not allow over-the-counter sales of Plan B, the emergency contraceptive, to girls under 17.

CLEAN ENERGY INNOVATION
Cost of Solar in India to Match Conventional Power this Decade
With the price of solar plummeting globally, India has announced that it will move up its target date to achieve solar grid parity by 5 years, from 2022 to 2017.

NEUROETHICS
Courtroom Neuroscience Not Ready for Prime Time
A new report on neuroscience and the law presented today by the U.K. Royal Society suggests that cutting edge neuroscience, such as using a brain scanner to determine whether a witness is lying, or a genetic analysis to determine whether a murder suspect is predisposed to commit violent crimes, is not yet ready to withstand public scrutiny of UK courts.

PHYSICS
Scientists Detect Preliminary Traces of the Higgs Boson
At the CERN particle accelerator 100 meters beneath the Franco-Swiss border, scientists are starting to narrow the window of possible masses for the long-sought Higgs Boson, the particle responsible for the existence of mass.

ELECTRONICS INNOVATION
New Path to Flex and Stretch Electronics
Researchers at Berkeley National Lab and funded by the Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Science Foundation are developing new techniques for fabrication of low-cost flexible and stretchable electronics in the future.

JUST FOR FUN
Never Wash Your Clothes Again, with Science
Chemical engineers in China say they’ve developed a cotton fabric that cleans itself — all it needs is a little sunlight.

INNOVATION & ENTREPRENEURSHIP
White House Launches New $1 Billion Fund to Spur Entrepreneurship
The federal government launched a $1 billion Early Stage Innovation Fund. It will provide matching capital to Small Business Investment Companies targeting early stage firms seeking funding from institutional investors.

INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Bipartisan pair of Senators Introduce “Start Up Act” To Accelerate Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Citing data from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, U.S. Senators Jerry Moran (R-KS) and Mark Warner (D-VA) this morning introduced bipartisan legislation aimed at jumpstarting the economy through the creation and growth of new businesses.

INNOVATION & ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Why the Crowdfunding Bill is Good for Start-ups
New legislation that could free up start-ups to fundraise online is gaining steam. Here’s how it could disrupt traditional capital formation.

BIOETHICS
Bioethicist: Plan B ruling trumps good science with bad policy
Art Caplan, Ph.D., argues that the HHS move to override the FDA and forbid the sale of Plan B to minors over the counter is based in bad science.

INTERNATIONAL CLIMATE
Raising $100 Billion for Climate Fund in Dispute
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has urged negotiators in Durban to raise $100 billion for an international climate change fund, but the U.S. has said it thinks environmental initiatives should come from private investments.

GENETICS
Clone a mammoth? Not so fast
Japanese scientists have hinted that they could be cloning a Wooly Mammoth in the next five years. But an analysis by Alan Boyle explains why that is unlikely.

BIOETHICS
NIH Accused of Dishonesty Over Chimp Research Plans
In August 2010, after public outcry, the NIH announced it would wait to review the analysis from an independent panel before sending over 100 retired chimpanzees back into traumatic medical research. However, animal advocacy groups have accused the NIH of returning the chimps to research before the publication of the review.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
What America’s piracy act means for business and innovation
America’s proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), if passed, has massive ramifications for creativity and innovation. Here is a nifty info graphic that gives a good overview.

PERSONALIZED MEDICINE
Personalized Medicine Conference to Convene in London in January 2012
The conference will bring together scientists, researchers, investors, public health policy professionals, and the pharmaceutical industry to discuss barriers and opportunities in the increasing adoption of personalized medicine.

INNOVATION AND THE ECONOMY
Despite Fiscal Crisis, EU Remains Committed to Supporting Science and Technology
According to State of the Innovation Union, a comprehensive progress report on the EU’s “Innovation Union,” the old world is on track to implement most of its commitments to innovation, science and technology, despite the looming debt crisis. Innovation the center piece of the EU’s Europe 2020 growth strategy.

SPACE PROGRAM
NASA scientists confirm Mars’s watery past
Discovery by Mars rover Opportunity “tells a slam-dunk story that water flowed through underground fractures in the rock.”

FINANCING INNOVATION
Crowdfunding entrepreneurship bill gains in Congress
U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte is co-sponsoring a bill that would let entrepreneurs raise up to $1 million a year by selling ownership stakes in their companies through what are known as crowdfunding websites. A similar version of the bill breezed through the U.S. House early last month. This proposal is one of the initiative in the President’s jobs package.

SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY
Bad scientist sent to jail
How a collapsing scientific hypothesis linking a mouse virus to chronic fatigue syndrome ended in an arrest.

NUCLEAR SAFETY
Environmental Group Says Limerick Nuclear Plant Needs New Safety Study
The Natural Resources Defense Council is trying to block the re-licensing of a nuclear plant in Limerick, Pennsylvania, amid concerns that its disaster-mitigation precautions are out of date.

SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY
Complaint Tests Rule Protecting Science From Politics
On Wednesday, a group of scientists filed a complaint with the Department of the Interior alleging that the government tried to compel researchers to exclude data about the environmental impacts of livestock in order to protect the interests of ranchers.

CLIMATE NEGOTIATIONS
Durban: The early skirmishes
The first week of the Durban climate talks have focused on delegates surveying the political landscape. One major point of contention is expected to be the Kyoto protocol, which several superpowers seem inclined to drop for a less binding agreement.

STEM EDUCATION
Experts Say Social Sciences Are ‘Left Behind’
In the push to institutionalize K-12 science education, school districts and curricula are de-emphasizing behavioral science and economics that could help students connect abstract content to their everyday lives.

CLIMATE SCIENCE
Thawing permafrost vents gases to worsen warming
In the next century, scientists predict that hundreds of billions of metric tons of gas will be released into the atmosphere as permafrost in the arctic melts. This process will undoubtedly accelerate the effects of global warming.

MEDICAL RESEARCH
In AIDS fight, a question of funding, not science
Scientists now believe they have the capacity to decimate HIV, but government funding cuts are thwarting progress.

INNOVATION CLUSTERS
New report maps global life science clusters
The global consulting firm Jones Lang Lesalle has released a meaty report focusing on several metrics determining innovation cluster success in the life science industry. The report provides data about existing and emergent life science innovation clusters around the globe.

STEM EDUCATION
Ill. among six states to set new K-12 science standards
Six states are working with the National Research Council and the AAAS to develop more comprehensive requirements for knowledge that students should have to graduate high school.

INTERNET PRIVACY
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg: ‘We’ve Made A Bunch Of Mistakes’
The FTC censured Facebook last week for bad privacy practices. The social network company must pay $16,000 and will be subject to biennial privacy audits for the next 20 years.

This week’s news compiled by Lauren Simenauer.

Dr. Jason Karlawish, author of 'Open Wound'

But in the name of charity and goodness, Beaumont ignores the orders and saves the young man’s life. What neither the doctor nor his patient understands—yet—is that even as Beaumont’s care of St. Martin continues for decades, the motives and merits of his attention are far from clear. In fact, for what he does to his patient, Beaumont will eventually stand trial and be judged.

Rooted deeply in historic fact, Dr. Jason Karlawish’s marvelous new book traces the peculiar career of 19th century clinician-turned-scientist Dr. William Beaumont, who became a scientific one-hit-wonder by exploiting the body of the man who’s life he saved.

Open Wound artfully fictionalizes the complex, lifelong relationship between Beaumont and his illiterate French Canadian patient. The young trapper’s injury never completely heals, leaving a hole into his stomach that the curious doctor uses as a window to understand the mysteries of digestion. Eager to rise up from his humble origins and self-conscious that his medical training occurred as an apprentice to a rural physician rather than at an elite university, Beaumont seizes the opportunity to experiment upon his patient’s stomach in order to write a book that he hopes will establish his legitimacy and secure his prosperity.

As Abigail Zuger writes in her review of the book in Tuesday’s New York Times:

Over the next few decades, the two danced around each other in an extraordinary display of mutual dependence, hostility, loyalty, guilt, gratitude and greed. Who owed whom, and how much? Where did the moral right lie? With the doctor, who had saved St. Martin’s life, supported him financially for years, and aimed to benefit all of humanity with his investigations? Or with St. Martin, a hopeless alcoholic but still a free man with the right to walk away, as he repeatedly did?

Ultimately, in perhaps the only such document to link doctor and patient until today’s informed consents for research subjects, a legal contract was drawn up between them, the patient promising to “serve, abide and continue,” and the doctor promising reasonable compensation. It worked, for a little while.

Dr. Karlawish, a physician and medical ethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, is well attuned to the overtones of his compelling story, from the graphic examples of the principles of autonomy and beneficence to the clear parallels between the rough American frontier and the primitive state of medical research. His Beaumont is a true tragic hero, an unpedigreed nobody determined to succeed on his own merits, yet undermined by exactly that determination.

Beaumont, always growing hungrier for more wealth and more prestige, personifies the best and worst aspects of American ambition and power.

The excerpt below takes place at the moment when Dr. Beaumont, a dedicated clinician, first recognizes the value of his patient’s wound to medical science and also to his career. On this day, Doctor Beaumont would begin his transformation from doctor to researcher, to employer, to entrepreneur, while Alexis would suffer his parallel transformation from patient, to subject, to employee, to object.

Excerpt from Open Wound: The Tragic Obsession of Dr. William Beaumont

Part I – The Taker Made Mad

By early October, three months after the shooting, summer was fast vanishing. Days were shorter but the light brighter, as if the sun were burning more intensely in a futile gesture to stall the onset of winter. The agents from the American Fur Company, and the American soldiers and their officers prepared Mackinac Island for the interminable months of frozen isolation. The brigades of voyageurs and Indians dismantled their tent and lean-to village along the lake shore and embarked in their bateaux and canoes and paddled north to Canada or south to the Michigan Territory to take shelter in the pine and hardwood forests of the mainland. The white children returned to school.

Alexis’ days had settled into a routine which began when Beaumont stepped into the infirmary of the ramshackle hospital carrying his basket of medical supplies.

“Good morning Alexis.”

He smiled as he watched Alexis yawn and rub the mount of his palms against his eyes.

“Good evening mon Doctor Beaumont.” Alexis laughed. “Good morning. Morning.” His accented English ran hard on the d’s, swallowed the r’s.

Still sore from his wound, Alexis lay flat upon his back, gathered his nightshirt under his armpits, then folded over the thin blanket to reveal his abdomen swaddled with the bandages Beaumont had applied the previous evening. Beaumont took care to wrap the bandages tightly around Alexis’ torso from his breasts to his navel. To keep them in place, he passed a final wrapping like a Sam Browne belt, across his right shoulder. The bandages themselves revealed the progress of the wound’s healing. It had been at least four weeks since the outer layer showed the ruddy stain of discharge.

As usual, Alexis gazed straight up at the ceiling, waiting patiently, blinking. “Madame Beaumont, she is well?”

“She’s well. Quite well.”

Alexis nodded and smiled. “Little Sarah?”

“Very well, thank you. They wish you well too. Now please Alexis, if you could just lie still as usual.”

Beside Alexis’ cot Beaumont placed the simple brown wicker basket that held bandage rolls, his surgeon’s pocket kit and a bottle of diluted muriatic acid he had gathered from the supply room. He sat on the edge of the bed, just inches from Alexis. The bed frame creaked as it always did.

Beaumont took his surgeon’s kit from the basket, unrolled it on the mattress, took up his jack knife and set to work methodically cutting away the dressings. Someone whistled as he passed close to Alexis’ window, and Beaumont hummed a few bars of that tune. He found himself tapping his foot to the timing of the blacksmith’s hammer.

He folded away the sliced bandages to reveal a wad of carefully packed bandages the size of a tea saucer. The skin around the wound was still inflamed but no longer grossly purple. It blanched under the gentle press of Beaumont’s thumb. He had not bled Alexis in over eight weeks.

He began to peel away the lint packing and with that packing now removed, the pink ruggated puckering of the inner lining of stomach bloomed through the wound like some large rose. Alexis coughed and the bloom expanded, glistening and covered with a limpid fluid, uniformly spreading over its whole surface and trickling to the edges of the wound. Beaumont gazed upon this display for some moments, then he applied three fingers of gentle pressure to the center of the bloom and it slowly depressed into the blackness of the space that was Alexis’ stomach. An amazing sight each time he witnessed it.

Beaumont folded a clean lint bandage into a square, soaked this with muriatic acid and began to wipe the edges of the wound and the track where once Alexis had a fifth rib. In time, Beaumont thought, all in time, this wound will close and I will have a case worthy of the Medical Recorder.

Alexis coughed again. A bit of meat, chewed, but unmistakably meat, popped out from the aperture and onto the bandages and a slow trickle of gastric juice flowed out from the lower margin of the wound.

Beaumont picked up the meat and inspected it. He had instructed Alexis to keep an empty stomach to prevent just such soiling of the wound during morning dressing changes. Now he held in his hand the evidence that Alexis had stolen a meal some time in the early morning hours. He was disobedient to be sure, yet this clandestine meal also was another sign of his slow, but now certain recovery.

Alexis laughed and muttered in French. Beaumont had seen food in just this state before. There was nothing unique about this morning and this piece of meat.

As he held the partly digested bit of meat between his thumb and forefinger and gazed at the wound, two facts came together for him. He felt as he did that morning some ten years past when he first stepped into his assigned hospital tent at the camp in Plattsburgh. Or when taking calls as apprentice to Dr. Chandler. It was the same sense in his guts and rush of blood to his head as when he was a boy jumping from the barn’s rafters into the hay pile.

For weeks he had observed that the hole into Alexis’ stomach gave off no odor or other evidence of putrefaction. Perhaps the cavity did not work as he had been taught, like a barrel to churn and ferment food, but in some other and, it seemed, more elegant manner. The action of the muriatic acid with which he painted the wound to cleanse it and stimulate healing was the same as the action of the stomach upon this piece of salt pork. The action was like a solvent upon the flesh, a solvent that affected a steady dissolution of the tissues. The stomach was perhaps not as he and so many of his colleagues had thought it to be some grinding bag or fermenting vat. It was some manner of chemistry, like an alchemist’s trick that made flesh disappear.

On this morning, an idea kindled not reason’s ordered plans, but desire laid to make the taker mad.

Alexis was his patient, of course, but he could be something else too. Beaumont could not conjure that proper word but whatever the word, on this morning he realized that this man, this wound, was his window to discovery.

Wondrous discoveries. Discoveries of the secrets of digestion and diet that would rival the work of the famous Parisian physicians. There wasn’t another proper doctor within hundreds of miles, a situation not only conducive to a steady and good income but now there was also the discovery of this treasure. It was his and it was simply waiting to be explored and written into a book. It was like the vast western lands that President Jefferson purchased and Captains Lewis and Clark charted and from which the American Fur Company extracted profits. The unknown was waiting to be known, and once known, rewards would follow. Promotion to Surgeon secured, election to medical societies. He would erase the humility of his medical training as an apprentice and the condescension of the medical college graduates. His reputation would be solid and preserved for posthumous time.

He shook his head like a drinker who’d swallowed more than his fill.

I am a doctor, not a scientist, he thought. This was work he had no sense of how to do, where to begin or how to finish before the wound fully healed and sealed its secrets. How would he convince Deborah of the worth of this sacrifice of time and their family’s money? And if it was ever done, whatever it really was, he had no idea how to sell it. The idea was swallowed bait, a folly even.

“God-damn,” he muttered.

Alexis grew concerned.

“What is it? Is there problem? A type of what you call, what you call, pains. Oui?” His smile had vanished.

Beaumont tried to calm his patient. He began to quickly wrap the bandages into a wad.

“Nothing’s wrong, Alexis. Nothing at all. You’re doing well. Truly, yes, all is well.” He reached out and embraced Alexis. He smiled as best he could. “You’re the very model of recovery.”

Alexis wrinkled his brow, then relaxed and returned his doctor’s smile like a moon reflecting the light of its sun but ignorant of the nature of fire that kindled that illuminating light. He spoke in unusually clear English.

“No, my Doctor Beaumont, I am your miracle.”

To learn more, visit www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=3849699 and www.jasonkarlawish.com.

Daniel Engber has authored an excellent, three-part expose at Slate that answers these and other questions about the animal research industry.

Part One, “The Mouse Trap,” looks at the realities and dangers of our dependence on cheap, couch-potato mice for medical research.

Part Two, “The Trouble With Black-6,” examines the peculiarities of the world’s largest research mouse supplier’s best-selling mouse, an inbred, alcoholic critter called Black-6.

Part Three, “The Anti-Mouse,”  looks at recent research using a hairless African rodent called the Naked Mole Rat. What makes this rodent worth study? Researchers have found that it seems to be completely immune to cancer, no matter how many carcinogens it is exposed to.

Additionally, Slate put together this excellent slide show, where you can meet the 10 most common lab rodents. An excerpt from part one follows.

The Mouse Trap

The dangers of using one lab animal to study every disease

The government’s top researcher on tuberculosis—still one of the world’s most deadly infections—seems to be running a midsized wildlife park out of his Maryland home. In a modest house on a tree-lined street in Germantown, Clif Barry keeps two kinds of turtles, three veiled chameleons, two Jackson’s chameleons, six species of frogs, half a dozen fish tanks (filled with cichlids, goldfish, and piranhas, kept separately), two dogs (named Jacques and Gillian), and an Australian tree python. “I’m an animal person,” he tells me. “My house would require a zookeeper’s license if Montgomery County knew what I had.”

Each step leads to the next: No drug can be tested in man until it’s been shown to work in mice, and no drug is tested in mice until it’s been shown to have a reasonable effect in the dish. “The bad part of that,” says Barry, “is that no part of it is predictive:” A new compound that succeeds in the dish might flunk out in the mouse, and something that can cure tuberculosis in a mouse could wash out in people…

The fact that nothing gets to humans today without first passing the mouse test, says Barry, “has cost us a new generation of medicines.” … Read the rest of this article at Slate.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius

HEALTH INNOVATION
White House announces $1 billion in funding for the next generation of health care innovations
The Department of Health and Human Services’ Health Care Innovation Challenge will seek to catalyze innovation and commercialization of health care technologies that reduce costs and increase care quality, while giving preference to projects that rapidly hire, train and deploy health care workers.

INVESTING IN SCIENCE
The Wolf’s at the door for White House science office
The U.S. House of Representatives seeks to save $2 million by shaving 32 percent from the White House Office of Science and Technology, a major coordinator of science policy across government agencies. Read about it here and here as well.

CLIMATE SCIENCE
Scientists: NY must prepare for climate change now
In a 600-page report released Wednesday, scientists from prominent New York universities warn that New Yorkers will observe more devastating extreme weather, effective immediately.

PARTICLE PHYSICS
‘Big Bang’ machine to get huge upgrade in 2020
The Large Hadron Collider in Geneva is set to be vastly upgraded by 2020.

GEOLOGY
Congo volcano eruption helps boost intrepid traveler numbers
In spite of its status as an entrenched war zone and hell on earth for women, the DRC has experienced a modest increase in tourism due to a volcanic eruption.

ASTRONAUTS WANTED
NASA wants YOU to be the next astronaut
Despite the discontinuation of the shuttle program, NASA still needs astronauts to man the space station and eventually travel to an asteroid and, one day, Mars. Check out these slides that give a peek into the emerging world of private space exploration.

ASTRONOMY
Jupiter’s moon Europa: Lake theory boosts hopes for life
New evidence has surfaced that supports the notion that Jupiter’s moon, Europa, might be habitable. Analysis suggests that sub-surface lakes, from which icebergs protrude, could sustain life.

BIOETHICS
Chimps’ days in labs may be dwindling
Despite the vital role chimpanzees have played in developing treatments for human disease like Hepatitis, animal advocacy groups may ensure the end of testing on the primates, which they consider to be cruel and inhumane, by the end of the year.

ENVIRONMENT
How green is high-speed rail?
New analysis suggests that the negative externalities of rail might still be better for the environment than air travel.

INFO TECH INNOVATION
Google’s lab of wildest dreams
At a lab not even the employees know about, Google is developing far-fetched technology like self-driving cars, intelligent refrigerators, and space elevators.

FINANCING INNOVATION
Small business angel investment bounced back in 2011
While angel investment slumped in the depths of the recession, the latest report on angel investing from the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire has good news.

TECH COMMERCIALIZATION
Department of Energy makes concerted push for national labs tech transfer
DOE’s technology transfer director says the timing is right to increase technology transfer from government labs to the private sector.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Chamber hits back at IP bill critics
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce issued, via blog post, a statement condemning the anti-intellectual property movement amid rumors that Google and the Consumer Electronics Association are set to sever ties with the chamber over its support of two controversial intellectual property bills in the House.

INNOVATION
‘Miracle material’ chips away at silicon dominance
A breakthrough in graphene research holds promise that the thin, durable, highly conductive material could replace silicon in making more powerful computer chips.

SCIENCE AND SOCIETY
No, Einstein: Older people innovate, too
Contrary to the commonly held belief that many scientists are most productive in their 20s and 30s, a new study suggests that, since 1905, scientists over 40 have made some important advances in science, too.

ASTRONOMY
Earth’s close encounter with an asteroid
As the 2005-YU55 asteroid is scheduled to pass by earth on Tuesday, a Yale astrophysicist considers the deep impact (heh heh heh) a collision might have for the planet.

NET NEUTRALITY
Senate Narrowly Votes to Maintain FCC Net Neutrality Rules
“The Senate Thursday —in a strict party line vote— narrowly overturned a Republican-sponsored “resolution of disapproval,” aimed at overturning new Federal Communication Commission net neutrality rules, set to go into effect Nov. 20.”

INNOVATION
Making a Boeing 737 More Like a Prius
A company called WheelTug is utilizing hybrid car technology to allow small engines to tug airplanes at low speeds with electricity only, maximizing their energy efficiency.

STEM EDUCATION
Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s Just So Darn Hard)
Amid the push to pump more science and engineering majors out of U.S. universities, a new study shows that 40% of college students intending to major in the sciences burn out and switch majors or fail to attain a degree at all.

AQUACULTURE INNOVATION
In the School of Innovation, Less Is Often More
A scientist at a Texas Marine Agriculture lab has revolutionized shrimp farming in the United States with a simple innovation–stacking indoor tubs on top of one another.

LIFE SCIENCE
Researchers purge cells that drive aging in mice
Scientists have found a way to deplete senescent cells, thought to contribute to aging, in mice. The discovery holds promise that medical research may be able to address the many diseases of aging.

TECHNOLOGY AND GOVERNMENT
Senate Dems: Go green or go dark
Language in the new Senate appropriations bill asserts that no lightbulb shall be purchased for a federal building unless it complies with green energy standards.

TECHNOLOGY AND GOVERNMENT
Government apps for mobile devices could be on the way
As government officials trade in their Blackberrys for other mobile devices, agencies across the government gear up to develop a myriad of new government “apps,” creating business opportunities for developers.

NUCLEAR SAFETY
Reactor in Japan restarts, a first since the tsunami
The first reactor in Japan since the Fukushima incident restarted in Western Japan on Tuesday.

PSYCHOLOGY
Mental-health guide accused of overreach
With the looming publication of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, psychologists levy critiques that the diagnostic manual overreaches in its diagnosis of psychological disorders they say have little scientific bases and will be used to “stigmatize eccentric people.”

DEMOGRAPHICS
Making sense of 7 billion people
On October 31, the world’s population reached 7 billion. Wired considers what this means in context of total biomass of the planet.

ENERGY INNOVATION
Late-stage VC funding for Solar Soars
As the cost of solar continues to plummet and the technology becomes increasingly mainstream, solar companies are increasingly seeking traditional growth equity rather than scarcer early-stage financing for new projects. This is a good thing, argues Climate Progress’s Stephen Lacey.

INNOVATION
Five steps for university inventors
A handy FAQ to help orient inventors to the world of university-industry technology transfer.

INNOVATION INCUBATORS
Innovation incubators taking off in Canada
Business incubators are helping foster clusters where a culture of entrepreneurship and technology commercialization can thrive across Canada.

INNOVATION INCUBATORS
How to build a venture-financed ecosystem
Mayor Bloomberg of New York has declared New York to be the entrepreneurship capital of the United States, and Daniel Isenberg of the Economist has a few tips for what makes for good venture ecosystems.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP
The way startups are being financed has completely changed
With credit still tight and risk capital investors increasingly focused on later stage investments, inventors and entrepreneurs are finding it difficult to get startup capital through traditional channels. Here is a list of five brand new ways innovative entrepreneurs are getting access to startup capital in the 21st century information economy.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP
North Carolina congressman introduces bill to help entrepreneurs get access to crowd-sourced startup capital (VIDEO)
Speaking of crowdsourcing, Congressman Patrick McHenry (R-NC) has introduced legislation to make it easier for entrepreneurs to crowdfund their ideas.

ZOMBIE RESEARCH
Support zombie fish research!(VIDEO)
Crowd-sourcing isn’t just for startups, it’s also being used to support scientific research. One project seeking funding on Rockethub.com proposes to study mind-controlling parasites that infect fish to see what the parasites have learned over millions of years of evolution about neurochemistry.

IT INNOVATION
The future, according to Microsoft
A slick new video produced by Microsoft Office depicts a super efficient future full of smart technology making our professional and home lives easier and more productive. It may prove good timing for the tech giant, as the death of Apple Founder Steve Jobs leaves uncertainty about whether that company will be able to sustain the level of visionary innovation in the next 10 years as it has in the last. Another interesting note: AT&T ran a similar add campaign in the early 1990s, and their predictions have been spookily accurate.

ENERGY
The truth about fracking
In light of anti-fracking demonstrations, industry scientists have promised that an accident while harvesting shale gas is improbable. Yet under certain circumstances, the risk increases. And despite a the threat of contaminating drinking water, drilling companies aren’t waiting for safer tech to extract natural gas.

SPACE AND CLIMATE SCIENCE
New climate and weather monitoring satellite boosted into orbit
A Delta 2 rocket lifted off shortly before 3 a.m. from the central California coast, carrying a new satellite jointly developed by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA,  into an orbit 500 miles above Earth.” The new earth-observing satellite is the most advanced of its kind, carrying four brand new types of instruments capable of making precise measurements of clouds, oceans, vegetation, ice, and the atmosphere.

NATIONAL LABS
New technology developed in National Lab pinpoints anomalies in complex financial data
New analytical software developed by Battelle researchers based in Richland at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory promises to analyze cast quantities of financial data and identify problematic trends that could threaten the financial system. In a demonstration, the technology picked out the atypically stable and positive returns reported by disgraced financier Bernard Madoff as an anomaly among hundreds of funds. While Madoff’s scheme lasted 20 years, it is hoped that this new technology can help detect such fraudulent activities sooner in the future.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
U.S. demands for user data spiked, according to Google
With videos of police brutality in Oakland and Manhattan going viral on Youtube, one has to wonder what happens when police departments demand Google and Youtube remove such content? Government agencies requested more user data from Google during the first half of 2011 as compared to the latter half of 2010, Google reported. Similarly, requests to remove content from youtube and elsewhere were up 70 percent. While Google routinely complies with most government requests to remove content and hand over user data, some requests, such as those from local law enforcement agencies to take down videos of police brutality, are denied.

CLIMATE SCIENCE
Outspoken climate skeptic admits he was wrong: global warming is real
UC Berkeley Physicist, Richard Muller, admitted he was wrong to doubt global warming data. After railing against Al Gore, the Wall Street Journal, and Climategate, after running the most comprehensive study of temperature records and publishing his data online, Muller said he had been wrong along along as his research corroborated the view that the earth is, in fact, warming. Funny how science works. Now if only politicians were so willing to change their minds when the evidence suggests they are wrong.

ENERGY
TransCanada’s Keystone pipeline threatened by proposed Nebraska re-routing
On November 1, Nebraska lawmakers will consider a bill that will re-route the Keystone pipeline so as not to pose a risk to the state’s fresh water sources in the event of an oil spill. Meanwhile, in Washington, over 1,200 activists, including notable scientists and advocacy leaders have been arrested outside the White House protesting the pipeline.

CLIMATE CHANGE
Dust storm shrouds Texas city
A large dust storm hit Lubbock, Texas, knocking out power and damaging trees with 75 mph winds. Experts warn these storms could become more commonplace as the average temperature in the midwest increases. Physicist, former Clinton administration energy official, and Climate Progress editor Joe Romm has a new piece on “dust bowlification” in Nature magazine. You can read the synopsis here.

STEM EDUCATION
Number of black Americans in STEM fields still falling
“Black Americans are 12 percent of the U.S. population and 11 percent of all students beyond high school. But in 2009, they received just 7 percent of all STEM bachelor’s degrees, 4 percent of master’s degrees, and 2 percent of PhDs, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. [...] The impact reaches beyond the black community as America struggles to produce enough scientists to prosper in a world ruled by technology.”

SCIENCE IN CULTURE
Jon Stewart does science
Lisa Randall, author of the new book Knocking on Heaven’s Door, was on the Daily Show last night to talk with Jon Stewart about the implications of science research and the problems with its communication. The episode also featured an entertaining segment about science in politics.

ENERGY
Feds eye new natural-gas source
This winter, the DOE will begin testing methane reserves in Alaska to determine whether they can harvest natural gas.

This week’s news was compiled by Science Progress intern Lauren Simenauer.

BIG DATA
Government aims to build a ‘data eye in the sky’
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity is funding a data collection system that will scan the Internet and catalog communication patterns, website traffic, market indicators, and the “movement of populations.”

STEM EDUCATION
Senate HELP Committee marks up No Child Left Behind rewrite
Yesterday’s mark up of the controversial No Child Left Behind reauthorization bill ended early and notably still missing an important amendment to create another Advanced Research Projects Agency for educational technology.

SPACE TECH
DARPA to launch satellite recycling program
90 percent of satellite failures are due to the malfunctioning of a single component. DARPA has announced a new program to design a team of repair satellites able to repair and recycle the dead satellites currently floating around as space junk.

MANUFACTURING TECH
National labs manufacturing research helps company save one billion dollars
Proctor and Gamble was able to reduce manufacturing costs by $1 billion with the help of The Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Labs, the birthplace of the atomic bomb. The cost saving manufacturing technology could be applicable across the $1.7 trillion U.S. manufacturing sector.

MED TECH
VCs to decrease investment in med-tech startups
The FDA’s regulatory process is the major reason and a report calls it a threat to investment to U.S. medical innovation.

OCEANS
U.S. residents say Hawaii’s coral reef ecosystems worth $33.57 billion per year
A peer-reviewed study commissioned by NOAA shows the American people assign an estimated total economic value of $33.57 billion for the coral reefs of the main Hawaiian Islands.

CLEAN TECH
How DOE-funded research helped bring the electric car back from the dead
Cutting-edge research in battery storage conducted at U.S. national labs has played a catalytic role in revitalizing the electric car industry, which now boasts several all-electric drive cars under $40,000 such as Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt.

CLIMATE SCIENCE
Koch-funded Berkeley Temperature Study does “confirm the reality of global warming”
The polluter-funded Berkeley Earth Temperature Study, or BEST, originally financed to cast doubt on the rate of global warming, has finished its “independent” analysis. BEST found that the earth is indeed warming, much to the chagrin of the coal conglomerate funding the study.

PHARMACEUTICALS
Calif. Medical Association calls for pot legalization
Physicians in the CMA acknowledge there is an open question as to the actual medical benefits of marijuana, but have called for its legalization and regulation nonetheless, in part due to the desire for more research.

DEMOGRAPHICS
With 7 billion on earth, a huge task before us
The world’s population is expected to reach seven billion this month, just 12 years after hitting the six-billion mark. That we have 75 million more births than deaths a year threatens to pose a huge detriment to society without the development of agricultural technology.

GENETICS
Young blood to the rescue
Scientists have cured mice of sickle-cell anemia by manipulating their hemoglobin to produce fetal versions of the cell.

SPACE
Russia wants to build a base in the moon’s underground tunnels
Newly discovered volcanic tunnels underneath the moons surface would make a perfect place to build a moon base.

This week’s news was compiled and summarized by Science Progress intern Lauren Simenaur.

At noon today Science Progress Editor-In-Chief Jonathan Moreno will be talking to a packed audience at the Center for American Progress about his new book,

About This Event

We have entered what is called the “biological century,” and a new biopolitics has emerged to address the implications for America’s collective value system, our well-being, and, ultimately, our future.

Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Jonathan Moreno’s new book, The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America, is the first book to recognize and assess this new force in our political landscape—one that fuels today’s culture wars and has motivated politicians of all stripes to re-examine their platforms. As Moreno explains the most contentious issues, he also offers an engaging history of the intersection between science and democracy in American life, a reasoned (and often surprising) analysis of how different political ideologies view scientific controversies, and a vision for how the new biopolitics can help shape the quality of our lives.

Copies of The Body Politic will be available for sale at the event, and Moreno will be available to sign books.

Introduction:

Neera Tanden, Chief Operating Officer, Center for American Progress

Distinguished Panelist:

Jonathan Moreno, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress; David and Lyn Silfen University Professor, University of Pennsylvania; and Author, The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America

Moderator:

Andrew Light, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress; and Associate Director, Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, George Mason University

INVESTING IN INNOVATION
National lab-driven technology creating jobs, impacting Americans with increasing frequency
The radio frequency identification tags that allow use touchless, swipeless access to buildings, transit systems, and even methods of payment are a great example of how publicly funded research can spur market growth and enrich society. “RFID technology, which uses radio waves to automatically identify people or objects, was initially developed at the Energy Department’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1970s to track vehicles and nuclear materials, as well as to track livestock to help control the spread of disease for the Department of Agriculture.”

STEM CELL RESEARCH
New stem cell method makes functioning liver cells
British scientists have developed new adult stem cell technology that has showed promise of growing liver cells in mice without remnants of their genetic histories.

SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY
We incorporate genetic information from the food we eat, new study finds
In a discovery that could stir the pot in the long-simmering debate over GMO foods, researchers at Nanjing University have found that micro-RNAs from vegetables can enter the bloodstream and regulate gene expression in the people that eat them.

21ST CENTURY BIOETHICS
Secrets of the human genome disclosed: Meeting debates ethics of revealing genetic findings
Scientists met to debate whether or not patients in clinical trials who have their genomes sequenced should be told about what genetic disorders they may be carrying. One solution is to require that genomic data be confirmed in certified clinical labs prior to disclosing information about undetected genetic diseases to patients.

NET NEUTRALITY
Verizon sues to scuttle net neutrality rules
Verizon has sued the FCC for what it considers to be undue burdens on growth in regards to the new net neutrality regulations. Opponents, like the nonprofit Freepress, say that the regulations didn’t go far enough to protect consumers.

SOCIAL SCIENCE
Computational model of peace predicts social violence, harmony
Network theorists have developed a model that manipulates computational data pertaining to ethnic, socioeconomic, and political borders to predict the waxing and waning of social violence. The model has passed scrutiny in its analysis of Switzerland.

ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE
Five reasons you should care about the new ozone hole over the arctic
A new paper has exposed a hole in the ozone layer over the arctic. Scientists have long been aware of the hole in coverage over the south pole, but only recently has the north pole ozone hole come to light. Researchers believe that arctic chilling, caused by warming in other areas of the world, is to blame for increased chlorine-oxygen reactions that split the three-oxygen ozone particle.

ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATION
EPA’s McCarthy: Clean air rules fuel jobs
EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy plans to testify before the house that environmental regulations will actually create jobs and help small businesses. McCarthy wrote that EPA rules have ignited the clean energy service and product market, and that better fuel efficiency standards will reduce the energy burden on small businesses while ensuring cleaner air for everyone.

SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY
Science publishing: The trouble with retractions
A spike in scientific journal article retractions is shedding light on flaws in the peer-review system.

PARTICLE PHYSICS
Higgs boson reality or chimera? Next year will show
Three top physics research centers issued a prediction that scientists will be able to confirm or deny the existence of the Higgs Boson within the next year. The elusive particle is believed to be responsible for particles in the universe having mass.

SPACE
NASA-backed space taxi to fly in test next summer
A private company is set to launch a test-flight of its first space taxi through NASA next summer. “Sierra Nevada Corp’s “Dream Chaser” space plane, which resembles a miniature space shuttle, is one of four space taxis being developed by private industry with backing from the U.S. government.” The spacecraft can hold seven and will ferry astronauts to the international space station.

CONSUMER TECHNOLOGY
Steve Jobs’ groundbreaking finale: Remaking the TV
Rumors have been circulating since the heartbreaking death of Steve Jobs that Apple had plans to innovate the television–plans that Jobs allegedly left behind for his company to take into its final stages in the next three years.

COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY
BlackBerry outage blamed on ‘extremely critical’ network failure
The BlackBerry outage that originated in the Middle East and Europe has spread to North America, leaving millions of customers without service.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
PC viruses are mostly your fault, Microsoft says
A new study from Microsoft shows that users are culpable for most viruses contracted by their computers.

CLEAN ENERGY
DOE’s $5 billion day
Hours before the clean energy loan guarantee program was set to expire, the DOE doled out $5 billion in clean energy loans to innovative clean tech companies. Three of them were immediately snatched up by established energy industry players.

This week’s news was compiled and summarized by Science Progress intern Lauren Simenaur.

We have entered what some call the “biological century” and a new biopolitics has emerged to address the implications for America’s collective value system, our well-being, and ultimately, our future. The Body Politic is the first book to recognize and assess this new force in our political landscape—one that fuels today’s culture wars and has motivated politicians of all stripes to reexamine their platforms.

As Moreno explains the most contentious issues, he also offers an engaging history of the intersection between science and democracy in American life, a reasoned (and often surprising) analysis of how different political ideologies view scientific controversies, and a vision for how the new biopolitics can help shape the quality of our lives.

Below we’ve reposted Friday’s interview in the Atlantic with Dr. Moreno. You can find out more about the Body Politic here.  

A former member of President Obama’s transition team; a professor of medical ethics and health policy, of history and sociology of science, and of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania; a national associate of the National Research Council; and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C., Jonathan Moreno wears many hats. His most recent project, the new book The Body Politic, explores how bioethical issues — stem cells, genetics — have become a part of our political discourse.

Here, Moreno discusses how neuroscience and globalization are both affecting his chosen field; the problem with medical schools across the U.S. backing off on their commitment to bioethics; and why he’s trying to integrate bioethics with the history of ideas, technology, and public affairs.

What do you say when people ask you, “What do you do?”

My short answer is that I’m a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The longer and more descriptive answer is hard because, intellectually speaking, I’m a mutt. I’m trained as a philosopher but I live in academic departments of medical ethics and of history and sociology of science. Professionally, I’m mainly seen as a bioethicist but what I’ve been trying to do for years is integrate bioethics with the history of ideas, technology, and public affairs. So, when people ask me, I say that I teach, write, and do research at the intersection of bioethics and policy with a strong sense of the American cultural context.

What new idea or innovation is having the most significant impact on the bioethics world?

I’d suggest that there are two: globalization and neuroscience. The preoccupation with globalization has clearly affected my own work. In my new book, The Body Politic, I argue that the battle for control over the power of experimental biology is partly shaped by the fact that science is a globally networked enterprise of scientists and their sponsors. In the new paperback version of my 2006 book, Mind Wars, I’m reviewing the way that the global war on terrorism has influenced the growth of research on the brain. Right now, I’m a senior adviser to the president’s bioethics commission, which has been digging up the facts about the venereal disease experiments in Guatemala in the late 1940s. That commission report is being followed by an assessment of the international protections for human research subjects today. Globalization pushes us to think more about justice and fairness, which have been concerns more typical of non-U.S. bioethicists.

The other area that is having a big impact on bioethics is neuroscience, which has undergone remarkable growth by just about any measure over the last 15 years. One of the keys has been the advent of new imaging devices that make it possible to do experiments with healthy persons rather than during neurosurgery. Another is invasive implants that can alleviate distressing symptoms of brain disorders like Parkinson’s. “Neuroethicists” even have their own professional organization in which I am active. I’m especially interested in the national security implications of cognitive enhancements that might be developed, though I think we’re far from some of the science fiction scenarios about “super soldiers” and the like. I’m sure we’re in for some surprises along the way.

What’s something that most people just don’t understand about your area of expertise?

Bioethicists are caught in an interesting dilemma. Some doctors and medical scientists tend to see us as cops who just say no to important experiments. Others see us as co-opted by the medical and science establishment. I see the task for academic bioethicists as inherently a critical one, as in but not of the establishment. But we also have a responsibility to explain the rationale for a particular treatment or study when we think it’s justified, even if the explanation doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker. I don’t know that there’s any way to avoid this dilemma but as long as we have critics on both sides I’d say we’re doing our job.

What’s an emerging trend that you think will shake up the bioethics world?

That’s exactly the topic of The Body Politic: Bioethical issues that were the province of academic discourse since the 1970s are now permanently part of the political discourse, which I call the new biopolitics. The most obvious example is the way that the embryonic stem cell debate became an issue in three presidential campaigns. Already we’ve seen a little dustup among the Republican presidential candidates about science. These controversies are often related to but distinct from abortion politics because they involve sophisticated new ways of manipulating cells and genes, raising the question of how far experimental biology should go.

Most people in bioethics are academics. To see our issues caught up in the rough posturing of politics is disconcerting compared with the nuances that occupy us. Similarly, I’m sure economists cringe at loose talk about government debt and monetary policy, and many of them find it annoying to be pigeon-holed as on the left or the right. We’ll just have to get used to it, as other disciplines have, because bioethical issues are now so much a part of the public conversation.

What’s a bioethics trend that you wish would go away?

I have the sense that a few medical schools are backing off their commitment to bioethics. The field grew out of social reform movements in the late 1960s when patients started to appreciate the growing power of modern medicine and insisted that they wanted to be in charge of the goals of their care. That ’60s generation of leaders in reforming medical education is retiring. Of course, there are also serious funding problems in many universities, especially state institutions, and it only gets more expensive to educate doctors. And people in fields like bioethics don’t usually bring in big grants, so there are other reasons for funding cuts. On the other hand, there are lots of new medical schools opening up, all with students who will need to learn some bioethics. I’m hopeful they will establish high-quality programs.

What’s an idea you became fascinated with but that ended up taking you off track?

I can’t think of one recently. In the kind of work I do now I’m always looking for details that inform my understanding of the role of the history of the financial system to pop music. I can say that in the course of figuring out how to write my new book I spent a few months bouncing around between a memoir of my experience as an academic in the world of public policy and a more historical and philosophical treatise on modern progressivism. My editor helped me find my voice so I think the result is just about right.

Who are three people or organizations that you would put in a Hall of Fame for your field?

The two pioneering bioethics organizations were The Hastings Center, a free-standing think tank in New York that was founded in 1969, and the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, which started in 1972. They deserve a great deal of credit for their vision. At the risk of sounding self-serving I’d add the University of Pennsylvania, which has tremendous strengths both specifically in bioethics and in complementary fields like the history and sociology of science, philosophy, neuroscience, and stem cell biology, as well as across the university. Penn’s president, Amy Gutmann, is a political philosopher who chairs President Obama’s bioethics commission; my new colleague Zeke Emanuel is a philosopher and physician who worked on health care reform in the White House; and my old friend Art Caplan is easily the most visible person in the field. There’s great excitement about bioethics at Penn.

What other field or occupation did you consider going into?

For a while in college I considered a career in public interest law, but as soon as I stepped in front of a class I knew I loved teaching. My romance with ideas began in high school, though I didn’t recognize that until I took my first philosophy course. And I love to write and felt at home in the academic environment, so my career choice was over-determined. I’ve always been fascinated by standup comedy. Perhaps I would have tried that if the opportunity presented itself when I was young. As a teacher I get some of the same satisfaction when I go for a laugh but my “performance” doesn’t depend on that reaction. If a joke doesn’t go over I just tell myself that I’m not there to entertain my students. But I can’t keep myself from trying.

What website or app most helps you do your job on a daily basis?

I’m an old-fashioned guy that reads the New York Times and the Washington Post every day. I travel a lot, work in several offices, and am writing something almost all the time, so cloud computing has greatly simplified my life. I also love the fact that I can go on the Web and nearly always find a video of some scholar whose work interests me.

What song’s been stuck in your head lately?

“Sunday, Bloody Sunday,” by U2. It reminds me that there’s nothing worse than cruelty and that, as frustrating as politics often is, it’s the only alternative to violence in resolving our differences.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Obama to Sign Bipartisan Patent Reform Bill Today
Hailed by the White House as a job creator, by detractors as contentious, and by some pundits as “pointless“, the America Invents Act will go to Obama for his signature today at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va.. Among the reforms in the bill, the biggest is a shift to a first-to-file system from a first-to-invent system.  However, the House overruled the Senate’s push toward including provisions in the bill to give the PTO control over its own funds collected from application fees.  The President is expected to sign the bill into law, despite concerns that it puts the “little guy” at a disadvantage.

GENOMIC RESEARCH
Analysis: Gene Sequencers Face Government Budget Squeeze
Gene sequencers are almost ubiquitous in big research universities, and the facilities that don’t have access—or want cheaper access—outsource to huge genomic centers.  Indeed, gene sequencing, which reveals the chemical “code” of DNA, is essential to almost all biology research, though its cost is astronomical.  Yet NIH funding cuts could decrease the number of sequencer contracts, further driving up the cost of experimentation necessary for genetic analysis.

SCIENCE EDUCATION
The American Jobs Act and Science Labs
The President’s proposed American Jobs Act contains provisions for retaining teachers and improving, specifically, science labs in schools.  The bill, if passed, will set aside $25 billion for school infrastructure, which includes implementing technology in classrooms and building better science facilities for teachers and students.

CLIMATE CHANGE
Al Gore: ‘The message still has to be about the reality we’re facing’
Al Gore just concluded a 24-hour broadcast promoting his Climate Reality Project, aimed at exposing the link between climate change and severe weather.

BIOETHICS
Ethically Impossible: STD Research in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948
The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues released its report on STD research in Guatemala from 1946-1953, finding the Public Health Service at the time morally culpable for injustices against close to 1,300 people.  Researchers intentionally exposed Guatemalan prisoners, sex workers, psychiatric patients, and soldiers to syphilis, chlamydia, and chancroid without their consent.  The chairman of the Commission, Amy Gutmann, Ph.D., asserted that “A civilization can be judged by the way that it treats it most vulnerable individuals,” and expressed regret for a “dark chapter in our medical history.”

ENERGY
10 Years After Sept. 11, ‘Business as Usual’ on Energy
Reports that the US still imports about 60 percent of its petroleum supply from the Middle East suggest that 9/11 had little impact on energy policy.

SPACE EXPLORATION
Deep Space Orion Capsule Being Built
Under pressure from Congress, construction began Sep. 9 on the multi-purpose crew vehicle, the Orion capsule, which will have the capability to take humans to the international space station, asteroids, Mars, and deep space.

NEGATIVE EXTERNALITIES
Google Reveals Its Carbon Footprint
After some reticence, Google has disclosed its carbon footprint and energy consumption figures for 2010, which measured 1.46 million metric tons of CO2 and enough kilowatt-hours to power 200,000 homes.  Internet pack-rats can rest easy, however, with the consolation that storing a year’s worth of email expends less energy than the amount it would take to consume a bottle of wine.

MARINE ROBOTICS
Why Climate Scientists, Oil Drillers and The Military Are Clamoring For Green Ocean Robots
Developers are testing the Wave Glider, an environmentally-friendly ocean robot that can operate autonomously for extended periods of time, gather an inordinate wealth of data, and run on solar and hydroelectric power alone.  Innovations in the Wave Glider’s artificial intelligence could revolutionize marine exploration and defense.

PUBLIC HEALTH
Biotech Firm Prepares for Real-Life Killer Bugs
Riding on the coattails of the blockbuster “Contagion,” AVI BioPharma says it is putting a Department of Defense grant to use and testing technology to stop an epidemic in its tracks.  In 2004, the company impressed the DoD by developing a new drug in just five days in response to a possible Ebola infection in Maryland.

NUCLEAR SAFETY
Blast at French Nuclear Waste Facility Kills One
An explosion at a nuclear plant in France responsible for waste processing killed one and injured four others, exacerbating concerns over radiation leakage.

ENVIRONMENT
Impasse Persists on Drugs in Drinking Water
A new report from the GAO has found that we are no closer to determining whether dangerous prescription drugs have significantly contaminated the water supply.  The news comes five years after the U.S. government deployed a task force to research the effects of pharmaceuticals on the environment.

OCEANS
Shark-Fin Vote Adds to Pressure on Hong Kong
The California Senate passed a bill banning the possession, sale, and distribution of shark fins—a milestone that endangered species advocates hope will inspire similar measures in big consumption centers like Hong Kong.

RURAL ENERGY EFFICIENCY
Senate Appropriations Committee Slashes Funding for Farm Energy Programs
The Senate Appropriations Committee cut funding for the Rural Energy for America Program (REAP), a popular farming subsidy for energy efficiency projects, by 50 percent for FY2012.

CLEAN ENERGY
Bill Gates, Others Push for Energy Innovation
Bill Gates addressed the Senate with a report on the status of renewable energy advancements and proposals for how the government and the business sector can align to promote the nation’s clean energy interests.  “Unfortunately, the country has yet to embark on a clean energy innovation program commensurate with the scale of the national priorities that are at stake,” the report stated, and called for a regular government review of technological and market weaknesses in order to distribute funds more efficiently.

This weeks news compiled and summarized by Lauren Simenauer, Science Progress intern and a senior at the University of Virginia.

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TECHNOLOGY AND EQUALITY
Can Universal Biometric ID Reduce poverty in India?
“Across this sprawling, chaotic nation, workers are creating what will be the world’s largest biometric database, a mind-bogglingly complex collection of 1.2 billion identities. But even more radical than its size is the scale of its ambition: to reduce the inequality corroding India’s economic rise by digitally linking every one of India’s people to the country’s growth juggernaut.”

NUCLEAR SAFETY
Nuclear Operators Told to Reassess Quake Risk
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Thursday they want the operators of all 104 U.S. commercial reactors to conduct new assessments of their facilities’ vulnerability to earthquake damage, reports the Wall Street Journal. Science Progress, noting the dangers posed by seismic activity and flooding, called on the NRC to do this in March following Japan’s 9.0-magnitude earthquake and the resulting tsunami that resulted in a meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex.

HEALTH TECH
The Rise of Electronic Medicine
In 2009, President Obama signed the HITECH Act, creating a $27 billion stimulus package to accelerate health-care information technology, or HIT, in the United States. Can HIT solve the problem of runaway health costs?

CLEAN ENERGY
National Clean Energy Summit 4.0 Rocks Nevada
An extraordinarily distinguished group of policy and thought leaders gathered in Nevada this week at the National Clean Energy Summit 4.0, co-hosted by the Center for American Progress, Majority Leader Harry Reid, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, and MGM Resorts. Speakers included Vice President Biden, California Governor Jerry Brown, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, and Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, among many other elected officials, business leaders, and policy luminaries. You can view the videos of the event here. The top quote about clean energy innovation from the event, according to twitter: “We will crush the opposition or listen sensitively, whatever the strategy requires,” –Gov. Jerry Brown.

REGIONAL INNOVATION
Kentucky to leverage nearly $155M in small business loans
Kentucky becomes the latest state to show how federal regional innovation dollars are being put to work. The Kentucky Small Business Credit Initiative will put $15 million in federal support to work locally through the State Small Business Credit Initiative. The $15 million in federal funds are expected to leverage over $150 million in private investment.

BOTTOM-UP INNOVATION
EDA Requests Public Comment on New Community Development Program
The federal register has published a request for comment for the Obama administration’s new Strong Cities, Strong Communities, or SC2, program. This program will provide expert assistance, grant application streamlining, interagency coordination, and technical support to cities and regions developing and implementing new economic blueprints that capitalize on local strengths.

CLIMATE SCIENCE
NSF Quietly Completes Vindication of Michael Mann
Michael Mann, one of the many scientists whose emails were hacked in the late 2010 “ClimateGate” scandal and who became subsequently embroiled in controversy, has been thoroughly and finally cleared of any wrong doing by the National Science Foundation. This adds the NSF to the long list of scientific and public organizations including Penn State University, the EPA, NOAA, and three others in the UK that have vindicated Dr. Mann of any wrongdoing. “Finding no research misconduct or other matter raised by the various regulations and laws discussed above, this case is closed,” reads the NSF report. Despite the strong and repeated vindication by numerous investigations, the media has been largely quiet.

ENERGY INNOVATION
World’s First Hybrid Solar-Geothermal Power Plant is Underway
It was only a matter of time before we saw the hybrid geothermal-solar plant. A group of business and policy leaders in Las Vegas at the National Clean Energy Summit this week announced the groundbreaking of the world’s first solar-geothermal power plant –a 24-megawatt facility that will combine 80,000 polycrystalline PV modules with traditional hydrothermal technology. One of the largest power plant developers in the world, Enel S.p.A. is building the project.

ENERGY INNOVATION
America is a $1.9 Billion Exporter of Solar Products
The United States in 2010 sold $1.9 billion more solar equipment than it bought. Even vis-à-vis China, a report released this week from GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association found that the U.S. has a $247 million trade surplus in solar generating equipment. Despite this week’s high-profile bankruptcy of U.S. solar manufacturer Solyndra Inc., net American exports, coupled with the globally tumbling price of solar PV bodes, well for the future of clean energy in America.

MANUFACTURING AND INNOVATION
MIT President on Manufacturing and Innovation
“The United States became the world’s largest economy because we invented products and then made them with new processes,” writes Susan Hickfield, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “With design and fabrication side by side, insights from the factory floor flowed back to the drawing board. Today, our most important task is to restart this virtuous cycle of invention and manufacturing…” Two Center for American Progress reports go into further depth about the innovation-manufacturing link here, and here.

SCIENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY
Science after 9/11: How Research Was Changed by the September 11 Terrorist Attacks
“New work in forensics, biodefense and cyber security blossomed after the attacks on New York City, Washington, D.C., and in the skies over Pennsylvania, but increased regulations have also stymied international collaboration as well as work on some infectious diseases.” Science Magazine also has a couple of good articles on the state and future of biodefense in America (subscription required).

VACCINES
Vaccine-safety report should reassure doctors and parents, experts say
“Vaccines rarely cause serious side effects, health officials say. When problems do arise, they most often occur in people with preexisting immune system disorders. The report, issued Thursday by an independent panel of medical experts convened by the Institute of Medicine—which provides independent, science-based analyses—should be used to help administer claims through the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.”

MARS ROCKS
Mars Rover Discovery Elates NASA
An old NASA Mars rover, operating long-past its expected expiration date, has found some pretty interesting rocks that have gotten researchers excited. NASA scientists giddily described the rock as full of zinc and bromine, elements that, at least for rocks on Earth, would suggest the presence of heat and water in the rocks formation.

RURAL INNOVATION
Patent and Trademark Office Holds Conference Highlighting Rural Innovation
As we wrote last month at Science Progress, innovation does not just happen in cities. It happens in the country, in basements, garages, and cities and businesses, large and small. More than 100 inventors from communities large and small attended the two day event where senior USPTO officials, successful inventors and intellectual property experts provided practical advice and information on such subjects as applying for patent and trademark protection, licensing, marketing and developing inventions, and accessing government and private resources.

SPACE EXPLORATION
Image Gallery: NASA After the Space Shuttle
This cool set of images and captions paint a rosy picture of a post-shuttle NASA. From storms on Saturn to new moons for Pluto to possibility of salty water on Mars to new rovers in search of the origins of life on other worlds, there is plenty to keep NASA busy in the coming decade.

STEM CELLS
Rick Perry’s Unorthodox Stem Cell Back Treatment Raises a Few Eyebrows
Governor Rick Perry underwent an unorthodox and untested stem cell therapy for his spine last month. “He had stem cells taken from fat in his own body, grown in a lab and then injected into his back and his bloodstream during a July 1 operation to fuse part of his spine… Some top scientists are questioning the safety and wisdom of Perry’s treatment, especially because it was not part of a clinical trial in which unproven therapies are tested in a way that helps protect patients and advances medical knowledge.”

WORKFORCE & INNOVATION
Southern Governors’ Association Releases Report on “Driving Innovation from the Middle”
The report focuses on the gap in middle-skill workers and demonstrates the need for worker retraining programs, and highlights how, despite lingering unemployment, 52 percent of U.S. employers are experiencing difficulty filling mission-critical positions within their organizations, up from 14 percent in 2010. A number of studies have found that America’s skills mismatches account for a portion of the increase in unemployment since the start of the Great Recession.

NUCLEAR SAFETY
Nuclear Reactor Near the Epicenter of Tuesday’s Virginia Earthquake Rated 7th-Most At-Risk
The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission has ranked the earthquake damage risk at all 104 nuclear power plants in this country. The pair operated by Dominion Power, at Lake Anna in eastern Louisa County, come in at 7th most ‘at risk’ on the list. According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, North Anna 1 and 2 face an annual 1 in 22,727 chance of the core being damaged by an earthquake and exposing the public to radiation. The national average for U.S. nuclear plants is a 1 in 74,000 chance.

INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP
A Boom in Regional Business Incubators and Startup Accelerators?
An Xconomy Survey found that the number of business incubators, organizations designed to promote entrepreneurship startup company formation, has nearly tripled since 2009 to over 60 today. From Los Angeles to Ohio, the popularity and profile of business incubators are on the rise. But what does “start up acceleration” really even mean? And is this a passing fad, or a structural shift in the way technology is developed and commercialized?

REGIONAL INNOVATION
Michigan Renames and Retools Economic Development Funds
The State of Michigan takes a page out of our innovation playbook by retooling its existing tax credits programs to provide better incentives for regional innovation and entrepreneurship. Grants loans and other economic incentives are now available for businesses or public works projects seeking to revitalize communities, create jobs, and promote economic growth.

ANGEL CAPITAL
Nebraska Tries to Lure More Angel Capital
The state of Nebraska will grant a 40 percent income tax credit for high-risk angel investments in innovative companies. The credits are part of a three-pronged innovation and economic development strategy championed by Republican Governor Dave Heineman. The other three prongs include an advanced internship program, grants to help businesses develop new technology; and a fund to help make industrial and commercial sites available for business development. 22 other states have some kind of angel investment tax credit, though many question the policies effectiveness at creating new investments that wouldn’t have otherwise taken place.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Federal Push for Cloud Computing Faces Skepticism
As outgoing White House Chief Technology Officer Vivek Kundera departs his post, his heavy bets on cloud computing face criticisms about the security of sensitive information.

INNOVATION
NSF Launches New Engineering Research Centers with Awards Totaling $74.0 Million
The National Science Foundation announced the award of $74 million to create four new Engineering Research Centers, or ERCs that will advance interdisciplinary research and education in partnership with industry. Two of these centers will be co-funded by the Department of Energy and will focus on development and demonstration-phase innovation around solar energy and electricity transmission. “ERCs are designed to speed the process of transitioning knowledge into innovation and to provide young engineers with experience in research and entrepreneurship, strengthening their role as innovation leaders in the global economy,” said Lynn Preston, the leader of the ERC Program.

GLOBAL HEALTH INNOVATION
A Plan to Treat Malaria by Sticking the Patient into a Microwave
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has announced $1 million in funding for an innovative project that proposes to kill malaria cells with microwaves, while leaving human host cells undamaged. Stephen Ward, the first Gates Foundation official to see the grant application, said his initial reaction was: “This is an absolutely crazy idea… it’s a crazy idea that just might work.”

CLEAN ENERGY ECONOMY
Infographic: Do Green Jobs Really Exist? (Spoiler: Yes They Do)
The green economy expanded three times faster than the economy as a whole, in the decade ended in 2007. Surprisingly, the data show that green jobs are not just for egghead engineers, “nearly 69 percent of all green-economy jobs are middle-class, middle-income positions—compared to just 43 percent of all American jobs.” 26 Percent of green jobs are in the manufacturing sector, compared with about 9 percent in the economy overall.

RESEARCH INNOVATION
New Service for Outsourcing Scientific Experiments
A new service, Science Exchange, has launched to connect researchers short on resources at one institution with laboratories elsewhere. The service allows scientists to pos the details of an experiment they want to conduct, and then evaluate bids based on price, timeliness, and the experience and equipment of those carrying it out. Could a new era of research modularity do for the process of scientific discovery what interchangeable parts did for manufacturing 200 years ago?

DIVERSITY IN SCIENCE
NIH-Commissioned Study Identifies Gaps in NIH Funding Success Rates for Black Researchers
In a self-funded study, the NIH found that black researchers were less likely to receive NIH grants than their non-black peers, even when accounting for research records and affiliations, among many other factors. The study’s authors propose future research into whether racial bias or differences in mentoring programs for scientists may account for the gap. The NIH plans to take steps to remedy the disparities.

SPACE EXPLORATION
European Space Agency to Team Up with Russia for the First Manned Mission to Mars
The European Space Agency has announced that it will team up with Russia’s space agency to send the first manned flight to Mars. Russia’s Mars500 Project, which is a simulation of manned flight to Mars, has been a success and has spurred the Europeans into joining the Russians. The Russo-European alliance illustrates the changing diplomatic ties in the post-Cold War era.

SPACE EXPLORATION
Offering Funds, U.S. Agency Dreams of Sending Humans to Stars
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the government agency responsible for inventing the Internet, has set its sights on the stars. Specifically, it wants to study what it would take to send a humans to another star. “The awarding of that grant, on Nov. 11 — 11/11/11 — is planned as the culmination of a yearlong Darpa-NASA effort called the 100-Year Starship Study, which started quietly last winter and will include a three-day public symposium in Orlando, Fla., on Sept. 30 on the whys and wherefores of interstellar travel.”

NUCLEAR REGULATION
U.N. Body Wants Wider Nuclear Safety Checks
In response to the tragic nuclear accident in Japan, the U.N. atomic agency plans to review 10 percent of the world’s 440 nuclear reactors for adherence to international safety standards. The decision aims to prevent a recurrence of the Fukushima meltdown in other countries and also comes on the heels of Italy’s decision to ban nuclear reactors in the future and Germany’s push to close all of its reactors by 2022. Some countries, however, have expressed concern that the initiative to monitor safety may infringe on their national sovereignty, even as new risks to plants arise.

ENERGY INVESTIGATION
House Oversight Chairman Widens Probe into CAFE Standards Deal
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has called for a deeper investigation into the Obama administration’s recent negotiations with auto companies about new fuel efficiency standards. Skeptical of the new standards, Chairman Issa argues that the executive branch may have brushed aside the normal legislative process by hashing out a deal in secret, thereby overstepping its constitutional limits. The administration countered by noting “that the new standards will eventually go through a formal rulemaking process and that reaching out to and consulting with private industry before issuing regulations is exactly what government should be doing.”

GENETICALLY MODIFIED CROPS
New GM Corn Being Developed for Fuel Instead of Food
Farmers growing GM corn specifically for the purpose of ethanol production have come under criticism from groups outside and within the agriculture industry. The new strain of corn contains a special gene that causes the corn to produce an enzyme that hastens the conversion of starch into ethanol. Relief organizations argue that the new emphasis diverts grain from food production, raising prices and worsening the burgeoning global hunger crisis. On a local level, farmers fear cross-contamination from the new ethanol-oriented corn, as North American Millers’ Association data suggest even a tiny amount of the modified ethanol corn could damage food products. As a whole, such criticisms suggest that the struggle over the safety of GM crops will not end anytime soon.

GREEN DEVELOPMENT
Bringing Solar Light Bulbs to the World
Inventor Steve Katsaros has come up with a remarkably simple yet useful product: a solar light bulb that charges during the day and provides light at night. With his patent and production process in hand, he wants to market his product to the developing world. Using a for-profit business model, Katsaros hopes to establish a network of dealers and distributors who market the new light bulb throughout the world. Like many others, he believes that technological and financial innovation can alleviate some of the world’s most pressing problems.

OIL LEAK
Shell Oil Leak Continues, Could Be Worst in North Sea Since 2000
On August 10, one of Royal Dutch Shell’s pipelines burst off the coast of Aberdeen, Scotland, releasing an estimated 1,300 to 4,000 barrels of oil in what could be the worst oil spill in the North Sea since 2000. Although Britain’s Department of Energy and Climate Change and the oil company dispute the exact extent of the leaks, they both agree that the oil will not reach shores. Having reduced the flow to just a barrel a day, Shell continues to work to stop leak. Shell predicts that the damages will not be as significant as they could have been and are certainly minor in comparison with those of last year’s BP gulf oil spill.

SECURITY INNOVATION
TSA Rolling Out Less-Invasive “Gingerbread Man” Body Scanners to U.S. Airports
TSA will provide “gingerbread man” body scanners to 40 airports throughout the United States. These scanners, unlike the ones in use now, do not show the details of a traveler’s body underneath clothes. Instead, they find foreign objects on the person’s body and project the locations onto a less-detailed “gingerbread” figure. If suspicious objects appear on this figure, the traveler is then given the normal full body scan. TSA hopes that this move will eliminate some privacy concerns that have overtaken public discussion in recent months.

HEALTH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Outbreak.com: Using the Web to Track Deadly Diseases in Real Time
HealthMap is a new computer program from Children’s Hospital Boston that allows people to use the Internet to track disease outbreaks on a map as they occur and also help health officials use that information to eradicate the diseases before they spread. The program automatically follows news websites, eyewitness reports, social media, and government data to recognize disease patterns. The researchers working on the program understand that they still need to improve their data collection so that they track only real threats instead of mere “noise.” This is another example of ways in which innovation in information technology can improve public health.

ELECTRIC CARS
“Boozer” the Electric Car Smashes Distance Record, 1,000 Miles on a Single Charge
A German research team recently developed a new electric car named the Schluckspecht E, or “heavy drinker” in German, that set a new world record traveling 1,000 miles on a single charge during a test run. The car has an odd shape, but it is very aerodynamic and has motors in its wheel hubs. The announcement, in addition to that of a Cadillac plug-in, tops a rather joyous week for cars that run on alternative fuels.

CLIMATE SCIENCE DENIAL
Rick Perry Calls Global Warming an Unproven, Costly Theory
After taking $11 million from the oil lobby, Texas governor and Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry recently claimed that global warming is a concept perpetuated by scientists who manipulate their data for money. These statements earned him four Pinocchios from the Washington Post’s Fact Checker. Five independent investigations conducted into potential climate science fraud have all resulted in the exoneration of every one of the handful of scientists investigated. According to his argument, simply not enough scientists support that climate change is anthropogenic, making it a merely unproven hypothesis, as some other politicians have incorrectly asserted.

PRETTY COOL
Lasers that Flash in a Quintillionth of a Second Could ‘Film’ Electrons as They Interact
Researchers from across Europe, Australia, and North America have devised a blueprint for a laser system whose flashes last for one-quintillionth of a second, or 10^-18 seconds. If successful, this new technology will allow researchers to “see” electrons as they engage in chemical reactions. This new capability may one day have broad applications from simple chemistry experiments to pharmaceutical research, among many others.

This weeks news compiled and summarized by Gaurav Dhiman.

INVESTING IN INNOVATION
NASA’s Futuristic Plans to Boost Innovation
NASA rejoins DARPA, ARPA-E, and a host of other catalytic federal innovation engines with the revival of its Innovative Advanced Concepts, or NIAC, program. After being retired in 2007 due to budget cuts, NIAC will return in 2011 to dole out 30 grants worth $100,000 each to spur innovation for future space missions. New funding projects may include exploring the potential of orbital metallic hydrogen fuel stations to power the spacecraft of the future, electric force fields to protect astronauts from space radiation, and spacesuits that use spinning flywheels for power. “NASA’s early investment and partnership with creative scientists, engineers and citizen inventors from across the nation will pay huge technological dividends and help maintain America’s leadership in the global technology economy,” the press release said.

MEDICAL INNOVATION
New Drug Could Cure Nearly Any Viral Infection
While we have had antibiotics that effectively combat bacteria for decades, few drugs exist that can effectively combat viral infection — until now. MIT researchers have developed a new antiviral drug that can treat multiple viral infections, from influenza to the common cold. The few antiviral drugs that exist today mostly counter specific infections. The new drug works by attaching to the unique double-stranded RNA that viruses produce in infected cells, and then initiating cell suicide. Normal cells that lack the viral RNA are left unaffected. Although the researchers have tested the drug only in human cell cultures and live mice, they hope to move to clinical trials. A number of government agencies, including DARPA, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, provided grants for the breakthrough research.

TOXICS REGULATION
It’s Glymes Time: EPA Takes on Obscure Chemicals in Consumer Products
Many consumer industries, from inkjet to pharmaceutical companies, use chemicals known as glymes as important solvents in their products. However, several studies over the years have shown that direct or even indirect exposure to glymes may pose a risk to individuals’ reproductive and developmental health. To combat these risks, the EPA has proposed new regulations that will make the approval process for new glyme-containing products more stringent.

MOLECULAR BIOLOGY
NASA Researchers: DNA Building Blocks Can Be Made in Space
Building on a decades-old body of work showing that bio-molecules exist in space, NASA scientists have found evidence that some meteorites may contain the nitrogenous bases adenine and guanine, important components of DNA molecules. More importantly, they found variants of these bases that normal organisms never use, suggesting that meteorites on Earth produce the molecules instead of merely absorbing them from the land around them.

ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATION
EPA Set to Miss Deadline on Ozone Rules
Environmental experts expect the EPA to miss an August 12 deadline to issue stringent regulations on smog-causing ozone. Facing stiff opposition from industry and Republicans, who contend that stiffer restrictions will prevent job growth and hinder business, this delay will be the fifth time since the 2010 midterm elections the EPA punted on implementing the new rules. The EPA estimates that the new, stricter standards could save 12,000 lives annually.

CLEAN ENERGY
Department of Energy Funds Nuclear Energy, Fuel Cell, and Hydrogen Storage Research
Over the last week, the U.S. Energy Department announced grants totaling almost $46 million that will fund research into alternative fuel sources. $39 million in grants for cutting-edge nuclear technologies and training will go to several universities. Additionally, the Energy Department will provide $7 million to four private and public organizations to provide cost analyses for R&D of fuel cell and hydrogen storage systems. The goal is to find the most efficient technologies in these areas to make them more practical in the coming years.

VISUALIZING SCIENCE
10 Award-Winning Scientific Simulation Videos
The Department of Energy hosted a “Visualization Night” competition that showcased several visually stunning scientific simulations. These computer programs simulated a variety of physical, biological, and chemical phenomena, from the formation of sunspots, to flowing blood in veins, to a laser-plasma accelerator. To do this, ordinary scientists often team up with computer and visualization experts to convert tomes of computer data into visual images that accurately reflect real-life phenomena.

ENERGY EFFICIENCY
White House Releases Heavy-Truck Standards
For the first time, President Obama announced fuel efficiency standards for heavy trucks. The standards require that heavy trucks produced between model years 2014 and 2018 will reduce their energy consumption and greenhouse emissions. The announcement had the support of the heavy trucking industry, which has pushed for standards many times in the past. The new regulations are a small step in improving air quality and combating global warming.

ENERGY INNOVATION
A National Program to Build the New, More Efficient Cars and Trucks of the Future
President Obama travels to Holland, Michigan, to tour its Johnson Controls, Inc., battery plant. In 2009, the company received $300 million in government grants for advanced research and has now opened its first facility. The president will highlight the role that the government plays in spurring clean energy innovation. His trip to Michigan comes on the heels of a recent announcement of new fuel standards for cars and trucks over the next 15 years.

GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOOD
FDA Faces Opposition Over Genetically Engineered Salmon
Eight senators have written a letter to the Food and Drug Administration asking them to abandon the approval process for the first genetically modified salmon product. In the letter, the senators threatened to introduce legislation that would defund the project if the FDA does not comply. Opposition to the FDA’s salmon study stems from concerns that GM fish will escape into the wild, outcompete unmodified fish, breed with unmodified fish, and potentially harm consumers and the environment. But the CEO of AquaBounty, the company that has developed the modified salmon said in a statement, “It would be a dangerous precedent to react to a handful of legislators’ misinformed paranoia… the real waste of taxpayer dollars would be to abandon the important American principle of science-based regulation…”

GENE PATENTS
Appeals Court Upholds Companies’ Right to Patent Genes
A federal appeals court ruled that the company Myriad Genetics can hold patents on two human genes that can help predict risk for breast cancer, but that the company’s process for determining mutations in these genes is not patentable. Regardless, scientists who wish to study the BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 genes will have to obtain permission from and pay royalties to Myriad. The issue of gene patents has existed for years, and patents exist for over 4,000 human genes, which is roughly 20 percent of the human genome.

MEDICAL DEVICES
Panel Calls for Rewrite of Medical Device Rules
An Institute of Medicine, or IOM, report suggested that the FDA get rid of its 501(k) clearance process, which allows companies to put new medical devices in markets if they can show that similar devices have already been approved and distributed. However, in recent years, some medical devices that were distributed through this process have been problematic, such as surgical mesh linked to infections and dysfunctional artificial hips that do not work. Additionally, the IOM has recommended that the FDA monitor new devices even more carefully once they hit the market.

SPACE STATION
Russia to Sink International Space Station In 2020
A Russian space official said this week that once the International Space Station is no longer needed, it will be deorbited and sunk in the Pacific Ocean. The Space Station was supposed to be brought back to earth by 2015 to prevent the possibility of it becoming dangerous space junk, but the United States extended its termination date to at least 2020.

NUCLEAR POWER
Germany Decides to Stop Using Nuclear Power
Last year, the German government decided to keep its nuclear power plants running until 2036 to provide for an easy transition to renewable energy. However, in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, the government decided to shorten the plants’ lives by retiring them in 2022 instead and build 20 gigawatts of new fossil-fuel power stations by 2020. This decision is expected to set back Germany’s transition to renewable energy by at least 10 years.

OCEAN CONSERVATION
Scientists Name World’s Most Important Marine Conservation Hotspots
A group of scientists identified 20 ocean hotspots critical to conserving the world’s 129 marine mammal populations. These sites include the coastlines of large nations, as well as lakes and rivers. More importantly, the study found that human impacts, such as pollution and shipping, have already begun threatening these hotspots. The researchers hope that their results will spur a political conversation about which ocean habitats to begin preserving.

This week’s science policy news brief compiled and summarized by Science Progress interns Michelle Spektor and Gaurav Dhiman, and Climate Progress Intern Tyce Herrman.

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SOLAR ENERGY
New Solar Panel Shatters Previous Record for Cadmium-Telluride Thin Film Efficiency
Leading thin-film producer First Solar announced yesterday that it had achieved a world-record efficiency of 17.3 percent for its cadmium-telluride cells, dramatically surpassing the previous record set in a government lab by .5 percent. This is a major step for First Solar’s technology, which will help the company continue to drive down manufacturing costs, and follows on the heels of several similar announcements from First Solar’s competitors. The lively competition we are seeing in the solar manufacturing market is another piece of evidence pointing to the conclusion that solar is rapidly becoming a competitive energy source in the United States.

ELECTRIC VEHICLES
New Report Defines Potential Roles for Utilities as Electric Vehicles Take to the Road
The Electric Power Research Institue, or EPRI, released a new report last week, “Transportation Electricication: A Technology Overview,” on the current status of electric vehicles and how utility companies will impact electric vehicle integration. The report finds substantial potential for gasoline displacement and CO₂ emissions reduction, and recommends plug-in electric vehicle adoption as a primary goal for the transportation sector.

STARTUPS AND INNOVATION
SBA Launches First Impact Investment Fund to Spur Innovation in Undeserved Regions
On Tuesday the White House’s signature entrepreneurship initiative, Startup America, announced the launch of its first “Impact Investment Fund” to invest in small businesses in underserved regions. This first fund will focus on Michigan, where unemployment is high and 90 percent of counties are in economic distress. SBA will provide $80 million in financing assistance to help leverage up to $130 million in total private and public investment to help boost innovation and entrepreneurship in Michigan.

INVESTING IN INNOVATION
New NSF AIR Grant Funds Projects That Promote Innovation
The National Science Foundation’s Division for Industrial Innovation and Partnerships kicked off its new Accelerating Innovation Research, or AIR, program last week with $9.2 million in research funding divided between two types of awards. One set of awards funds the development of proof of concept and technology translation plans for discoveries made by NSF-sponsored researchers, while the other funds new research alliances between existing NSF-funded consortia and industry partners. Altogether, the program funds 22 projects and is one of the federal government’s most recent attempts to improve investment in the critical “valley of death” early-stage technology transfer gap.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Software Patents May Be Stifling Innovation
Recently, companies such as Google, HTC, Oracle, and Samsung have become embroiled in patent lawsuits over various technologies and software. At present, Oracle is suing Google for billions of dollars in damages for infringement on Android operating software. Many believe these kinds of lawsuits are a result of more systemic problems with our patent system and drive up the costs of innovation.

INNOVATION METRICS
NSF Makes Industrial R&D Data More Accessible
Scoring big points for data transparency, NSF has released an online form of its database, the Industrial Research and Development System, or IRIS, which holds all of the statistical information produced by NSF’s Survey of Industrial Research and Development from 1953 to 2007. In 2007 this survey was replaced by the current Business Research and Development and Innovation Survey, or BRDIS, to collect information from more than 40,000 companies about their R&D expenditures and workforce statistics. By opening up the digital IRIS database of original surveys, NSF has now enabled policymakers and scholars to access a wealth of valuable information.

SCIENCE FUNDING
NSF Merit Review Process Under Review in Congress
A U.S. House subcommittee held a hearing on the NSF merit review, a process that determines which research projects to fund each year, to make sure the agency funds the most promising science in the field. Analyses suggest that proposals with low ratings from external reviewers received funding, but many with excellent ones were underfunded. Subcommittee members questioned various academics and NSF officials on how the process could be improved. Suggestions included immediately rejecting low-quality proposals and awarding funds based only on scientific merit instead of broader impact criteria currently used to incentivize scientists to pursue solutions to national priorities. The Advisory Committee on Merit Review Process and the Task Force on Merit Review will hold future meetings to further explore the issue.

SPACE PROGRAM
NASA and SpaceX Tentatively Agree to Accelerate Test Flight Schedules
SpaceX has asked NASA, its public partner, to help it combine its last two remaining test missions to the International Space Station, or ISS, into one that will dock at the ISS and deliver cargo. Previously SpaceX and NASA had agreed to do two separate test runs: one in which the SpaceX Dragon capsule would fly near the ISS, and a second one in in which the Dragon capsule would actually dock and deliver cargo to the space station. NASA has granted SpaceX tentative approval to combine these missions into one.

PEER REVIEW
U.S. Geological Survey Loosens Peer-Review Rules
The U.S. Geological Survey, or USGS, has updated its peer-review regulations, making it easier for researchers to publish their work outside the department. Previously, the USGS required all researchers seeking to publish their work in outside journals to first submit their research to two internal reviewers and obtain the approval of a higher-level official. Now, scientists can submit their papers to a single internal reviewer or submit internally and externally simultaneously. The latter will require final review from an official in the Office of Science Quality and Integrity.

FERTILITY
IVF Treatment and Multiple Births: Free-Market Patient Rights Versus Government Regulation
The question of how many embryos can safely be implanted into a uterus, and whether or not this is an issue deserving government regulation, was discussed in several commentaries recently published in Reproductive BioMedicine Online. Fertility clinics often implant several embryos during in vitro fertilization procedures in order to maximize the likelihood of pregnancy, but this can, in rare cases, result in dangerous multiple pregnancies. Recent legislation in Quebec, Canada, aims to reduce the frequency of harmful multiple pregnancies—raising the question of whether or not governments can determine how many embryos can be transferred into a single female and whether this becomes a case of government overreach.

POLLUTION
Climate Change Remobilizes Long Buried Pollution as Arctic Ice Melts
Rising temperatures in the Arctic over the last two decades has caused the release of toxic chemicals trapped in the snow, ice, ocean, and soil. These chemicals include certain persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, which settled into reservoirs before being banned internationally by the Stockholm Convention. When these semivolatile compounds evaporate, they can travel long distances over air currents, persist in food and water, and build up in the body fat of humans, causing numerous health problems. Scientists fear this phenomenon may undermine the goals of the Stockholm Convention.

DEMOGRAPHICS
World Population to Surpass 7 Billion in 2011
Population experts have predicted that the world population will surpass 7 billion by year’s end, 9 billion by 2050, and 10 billion by 2100. The distribution of these increases will vary throughout less and more developed nations, with the former accounting for 97% of increases over the next 40 years. On the other hand, more developed nations will experience relatively small changes but will face an aging population relying on the support of a younger, yet smaller, population.

BIODIVERSITY LOSS
Ongoing Global Biodiversity Loss Unstoppable with Protected Areas Alone: Study
A new study suggested that the creation of protected habitats may not be enough to significantly reduce biodiversity loss on a global scale. Although there are over 100,000 protected areas covering 17 million square kilometers of land and 2 million square kilometers of oceans, their small and insufficient sizes, lack of accommodations for all types of environmental stresses, and lack of funding, renders this system incapable of solving the problem of biodiversity loss on its own. Researchers also suggested that new protection approaches should focus on directly mediating the causes of species loss, such as increasing global population and resource demands.

This week’s science policy news brief compiled and summarized by Science Progress interns Michelle Spektor and Gaurav Dhiman, and Climate Progress Intern Tyce Herrman.

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LOOKING BACK AT THE SPACE PROGRAM
Space Shuttle’s Science Brought Payoffs to Earth
The Atlantis Space Shuttle’s last-ever landing Thursday morning gives us a moment to reflect on the benefits the shuttle program has brought to society. Much of the science and technology that went into the shuttle program has led either to the production of commercial products or to new scientific discoveries. From algae that produce milk-like proteins now used in 90 percent of infant formulas to temperature-controlling material designed for astronaut spacesuits now used in high-performance socks and other clothing, the shuttle program has made its mark on science and technology. Shuttle science has also contributed to several significant fields, including astronomy, topology, medicine, nutrition, electronics, and aviation. NASA even puts out a yearly list of spinoff projects based on the science behind the space shuttle.

FUTURE OF THE SPACE PROGRAM
A Cloudy Vision of U.S. Spaceflight
Following the landing of NASA’s last space shuttle on Thursday, the agency plans to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025. Because of possible budget cuts, increasing costs, and withering political will, however, such ideas for future projects remain vague. Compared to a few years ago, the agency faces even more questions over its agenda for the next several years. For this reason, some fear that American dominance of spaceflight may come to an end.

SPACE PROGRAM
NASA Spacecraft Enters Orbit Around Asteroid Vesta
NASA’s Dawn spacecraft became the first in history to orbit an asteroid in our solar system’s asteroid belt on July 16. It took four years for the unmanned Dawn to travel to and begin orbiting Vesta, the brightest asteroid in the asteroid belt, located 117 million miles away from Earth. The probe will study Vesta for a year and then will travel to Ceres, the largest known asteroid in the solar system. The data collected from these space missions are expected to be crucial to fulfilling President Obama’s goal to send astronauts to asteroids by 2025.

FOOD SAFETY
Costco and BPI Require Broad E. Coli Testing
Two companies, Costco Wholesale and Beef Products Inc., or BPI, have started testing for multiple strains of E. coli in their food products. For years the U.S. federal government has stalled the passage of rules drafted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which would require companies to test for six different strains of E. coli—the well-known O157:H7 plus five other pathogenic strains. The lack of government action and the alarm generated by the recent deadly E. coli outbreak in Germany led Costco and BPI to take charge of the issue on their own. Testing is not completely new but has become more feasible as medical companies have developed more efficient and available detection kits.

PUBLIC HEALTH
Recent Study Shows No Link Between Cell Phone Use and Brain Tumors
A recent study of 3 million adult Danish cell phone users, published in the American Journal of Epidemiological Research, reported no link between cell phone use and noncancerous brain tumors. Although the International Agency for Research on Cancer, or IARC, classified cell phones as possible carcinogens earlier this year, most past studies have also shown no obvious cause-and-effect relationship. These findings are not absolutely certain, however, as none of the test subjects in this or past studies used a cell phone for more than 15 years.

ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY
EPA Sued over Smog in Los Angeles Basin
Public health and environmental groups sued the Environmental Protection Agency over its failure to meet the Clean Air Act’s May deadline to determine whether ozone levels in the Los Angeles Basin area are too high. Plaintiffs contend that this inaction is a failure on the part of local and federal officials’ promise to crack down on smog and ozone pollution, which cause many health problems, including inflammation of the respiratory system. This region has the highest ozone levels in the nation, and Los Angeles is home to 1 million adults and 300,000 children with asthma.

CLIMATE SCIENCE
How Dairy Farms Contribute to Greenhouse Gas Emissions
A USDA study in the Journal of Environmental Quality is the first to provide a detailed look at the greenhouse gas emissions of large dairy facilities. Researchers found that an Idaho commercial dairy farm with 10,000 milk cows released hundreds to tens of thousands of pounds of nitrous oxide, methane, and ammonia each day over the course of a year. Many of the emissions occurred during the daytime and varied with wind temperature, air speed, and livestock activity.

CLEAN ENERGY
House Votes to Sustain Funding for ARPA-E in 2012
With a vote of 214-213, the House passed an amendment to increase 2012 funding for the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy by $180 million. This sum matches the funding for this year but pales in comparison to the $550 million that the Obama administration had requested. The House also passed an amendment to provide an added $10 million to solar energy research programs but this amount is still well below this year’s funding.

CLIMATE CHANGE
Shipping Industry Agrees to CO2 Emission Standards
At the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization in London, the shipping industry agreed to apply international CO2 emission standards to all new ships of more than 400 tons and delivered after 2015. The standards allow developing nations to waive these requirements until 2019, and to the concern of some environmental activists, also do not extend to already-existing ships. The industry has become the first in the world, however, to implement mandatory global CO2 standards, and they hope to improve their energy efficiency by 30 percent by 2024.

This week’s news compiled and summarized by Science Progress interns Michelle Spektor and Gaurav Dhiman.

Have feedback about this feature?  Let us know how you like this feature by commenting at facebook.com/scienceprogress, tweeting us @scienceprogress, or emailing us at editor@scienceprogress.org.

With contentious negotiations about the debt ceiling, long-term federal spending, and fiscal year 2012 appropriations taking place between Congress and the president, we thought it appropriate to bring you a 200-level lesson in the federal science budgeting process. Written by a team that includes Dr. Neal Lane, former NSF Director and Science Adviser to President Clinton, this report sheds light on the recondite way we fund science and expands upon the material presented in our U.S. Scientific R&D 101 charticle released earlier this year.

Science Progressing: July 15

SCIENCE CUTS
Science And Research Organizations Urge Policymakers Not To Remove Programs
Amid looming budget cuts, a consortium of more than 140 science societies drafted a letter urging policymakers not to cut funding for any particular research programs. Singling out particular programs, the letter suggested, would undermine the nation’s vested interest in scientific progress and discourage would-be scientists from entering the field. The letter was specifically targeted at policymakers who will debate the Commerce, Justice, and Science appropriations bill for fiscal year 2012 in the coming weeks.  The AAAS, the American Chemical Society, the American Physical Society, and other prominent organizations supported the letter. For more on the debt limit, see CAP’s U.S. debt limit 101.

CYBER SECURITY
DOD Could Use Force in Cyber War
The Pentagon has stated that it “reserves the right” to use military force against cyberattacks in a newly declassified 13-page cyberstrategy document this week. This came in part as a response to the rising specter of cyber sabotage exemplified by the Stuxnet attack on Iran’s nuclear program, and to the cybertheft of 24,000 files by a foreign government this past spring. The declassified cyberstrategy outlines five new initiatives that the pentagon will take to increase American cyber security. As part of the efforts, the Pentagon will devote more funding to building its cyberdefenses. Questions remain, however, about what defines an “act of war” in the cyberworld. This follows a May proposal from the White House to update and improve domestic cyber security laws.

CARBON MARKETS
Australia Puts a Price on Carbon
The 500 biggest polluters in Australia will be required to pay $24.60 per ton of carbon emitted into the atmosphere, starting in July of next year. Though Australia only produces roughly 1.3 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, it has one of the highest rates of emission per person. The government plans to raise the tax by 2.5 percent each year until July 2015, at which point an emission-trading program will be created. Up to $10 billion dollars of the tax revenue will help fund low pollution measures, clean energy research, energy-efficient technologies, and even tax cuts. By 2020, the plan should reduce Australia’s emissions by 5 percent, which is equal to the emissions produced by 45 million cars.

STEM EDUCATION
STEM Workers Live Long and Prosper
A new report released Thursday by the Economics and Statistics Administration found that employment in science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM, fields grew 3 times faster than job growth in non-STEM fields. These report also found that “STEM workers command higher wages, earning 26 percent more than their non-STEM counterparts”, and that STEM jobs “are expected to continue to grow at a faster rate than other jobs in the coming decade.” Our recent reporthighlighted the importance of a STEM-trained labor force to our nation’s innovation system and global economic competitiveness.

ELECTRICITY REGULATION
GOP Light Bulb Amendment Likely To Pass Friday After Earlier Defeat
A Republican-led effort to repeal energy efficiency standards for light bulbs, part of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 signed under President George W. Bush, failed to obtain the two-thirds majority it needed in the House earlier this week, but could succeed on a simple majority vote today. With a few exceptions, the law, starting January 1 of next year through 2014, will require all light bulbs to be 25 to 30 percent more efficient. House Republicans argued that the law is an example of government overreach in offering the amendment to repeal it, but Democrats believe that the more efficient bulbs will save American families $6 billion per year in the long run.

NEUROSCIENCE
Stem Cells Restore Cognitive Abilities Impaired by Brain Cancer Treatment
UC Irvine researchers have found that stem cells may help cancer patients regain some of their learning and memory abilities after they have been lost due to radiation treatment. Radiation-damaged rats who were given multipotent human neural stem cells improved, while rats not given the treatment showed no improvement. Some of these stem cells became neurons and integrated themselves into the memory area of the brain, or turned into cells that support cerebral neurons.

JUST FOR FUN
Proof that Rebecca Black was Right
In March 2011, YouTube phenomenon Rebecca Black’s music video “Friday” went viral in cyberspace and was dismissed by some as utterly ridiculous and lauded by others as completely genius. Whether you love her or hate her, it turns out that the main point of her song, that “everybody’s looking forward to the weekend,” may have some scientific validity. A recent National Bureau of Economics study showed that people experience more happiness, enjoyment, and laughter on weekends than on weekdays, and there is evidence that the social aspects of weekends that Black emphasizes in her song might have something to do with this. Three-day weekends much?

PHYSICS RESEARCH
Harry Potter and the Invisibility Cloak: Part 2.  Hidden in Time
Cornell University researchers have made incremental progress toward building an “invisibility cloak,” akin to the piece of cloth that hides up-and-coming wizards in the Harry Potter books and films.  Devices that hide objects by bending light around them currently exist, but this one uses a different principle to create invisibility. Rather than bending light around an object, the Cornell “space-time cloak” creates a blindspot in time, making certain events unnoticeable.  The device works because when light enters through an object (e.g. a lens), some wavelengths are slowed down while others speed up.  Very short events (so far, not more than 1.25 micro seconds) can be hidden because half the bent light arrives before the event happens, and the other half arrives after the event has taken place.

CHAMPION ROBOTS
American Soccer Robots Dominate at the World RoboCup 2011
A pair of robots designed by Virginia Tech’s RoMeLa team took top honors at the World RoboCup for the adult-size and child-size categories. The adult robot, named CHARLI-L2, won one match 4-1, setting a record for the highest score ever achieved by a humanoid robot. The child robot was named DARWIn-OP. The organizers of the World RoboCup not only hope to showcase the latest development in robotics each year but also want robots able to compete with humans in soccer by 2050.

Watch the robot soccer here:

This week’s news compiled and summarized by Science Progress interns Michelle Spektor and Gaurav Dhiman.

Have feedback about this feature?  Let us know how you like this feature by commenting at facebook.com/scienceprogress, tweeting us @scienceprogress, or emailing us at editor@scienceprogress.org.

Science Progressing: July 8

SCIENCE EDUCATION
A new model for science education
New research by Carl Wieman suggests that traditional lecture-style science courses are no longer an effective way to impart scientific knowledge to students. Unconventional teaching methods inspired by cognitive psychology that stimulate motivation and require students to “think like scientists” resulted in better attendance, more classroom engagement and higher test scores. According to the AAAS, Wieman’s teaching methods will better prepare future scientists for the challenges of the 21st century.

CELL PHONE SECURITY
News of the World closure after hacking scandal
A 168-year-old weekly publication based in England allegedly hacked into the cell phones of celebrities, soldiers, and an abducted girl. The owner of News of the World, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, announced that the paper will be shutting down this week and several of the publication’s journalists are expected to be arrested in the coming days. The incident overseas raises questions about whether the federal government is doing enough to secure cell phone and other personal data in this country.

CLIMATE DENIERS
Greenpeace report confirms climate denier scientist funded by ExxonMobil and others
Dr. Willie Soon, a scientist who attempts to disprove the findings of climate scientists through his own research, reportedly received much of his funding from big oil and big coal. According to Greenpeace, Soon received up to $1 million from companies in the oil and coal industries, including ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute, Southern Company, and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. There is currently speculation as to whether or not these companies worked together to fund Soon’s research in the interest of advancing their business agendas.

SPACE PROGRAM
NASA’s last space shuttle blasts into history
An estimated 750,000 people jammed Cape Canaveral this morning to watch NASA’s final space shuttle launch. The shuttle is bringing a year’s worth of supplies to the International Space Station, marking the end of NASA’s participation in the space station program. After its 12-day mission the space shuttle will go on permanent display at the Kennedy Space Center. Private companies are expected to take over launching astronauts and supplies to the space station and, in keeping with the president’s priorities, NASA will focus its future efforts on Mars, earth observation, and asteroid research.

SPACE AND THE BUDGET
Congress proposes nixing flagship telescope
In addition to the impending retirement of the space shuttle, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, could be on the chopping block as well. The Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee is currently considering defunding the project in its fiscal year 2012 budget proposal for NASA and other agencies. If completed, the space telescope would enable astronomers to monitor the possibility of life on planets orbiting distant stars and observe the formation of galaxies in the earliest years of the universe. But behind schedule and over budget, the innovative new piece of equipment is a prime target for the Committee’s budget cuts.

CLIMATE SCIENCE AND SECURITY
UN Security Council to take up climate change
For the second time in four years, the U.N. Security Council will debate the issue of climate change. Unlike earlier attempts to put the issue on the agenda, several developing countries now support climate change discussions in light of global security and other concerns. Several small island governments have requested that the U.N. appoint a special adviser on climate change, and that the Security Council discuss climate change on a monthly basis. They hope such activities will increase the global sense of urgency on the issue.

MEDICAID AND HEALTHCARE
Study finds Medicaid increases use of health care, decreases financial strain, improves health
Researchers from Harvard, MIT, and the National Bureau of Economic Research have found that Medicaid coverage boosts low-income adults’ use of preventative care, lessens their financial stress, and improves their self-reported health. According to the study, Medicaid patients consume more health care across all categories except emergency services. Recipients of Medicaid benefits were also less likely to borrow money for health care or go into debt. Researchers also reported better health outcomes among patients after a year of coverage.  In a new report released today, CAP’s Scott Lilly explains how the Ryan budget plan for Medicaid would have extraordinary implications not only for poor individuals but for a very broad swath of middle-class families as well.

GREEN ENERGY
Global investments in green energy up nearly a third to $211 billion, but private RD&D declined
Last year, investors invested a record $211 billion in renewables, amounting to a 32 percent increase since the previous year, according to a new UNEP study. For the first time, developing countries spent more money on utility-scale renewables than developed countries. Small scale deployment of commercial renewable energy technologies showed big increases, though stock prices and corporate research, development, and deployment, or RD&D, saw overall decreases. These decreases reflected investor concerns about industry over-capacity, cutbacks in subsidy programs, and competition from cheap natural gas, according to the study. CAP’s recent report on low-carbon innovation looks more closely at some of these barriers and lays out a proposal for sustained growth in the clean energy sector.

FIRE AND CLIMATE CHANGE
Future fire–Still a wide open question
Australia’s national science agency, The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, suggests that human understanding of the relationship between fires and climate change will need to change, develop, and become more perfect as fires occur with increasing frequency. In particular, fires release aerosols and GHG into the atmosphere and influence the amount of carbon absorbed by organisms in the carbon cycle. There is some evidence that the frequency of fires has picked up in the Western United States.

CULTURE AND NEUROSCIENCE
Scientific evidence that pop culture matters
Think Progress’s culture blogger, Alyssa Rosenberg, has an interesting take on a recent study on how viewing positive and negative images of minority groups can affect a person’s adherence to stereotypes. The study found that students at a mostly white college, after viewing positive and negative images of minority groups, were more likely to stereotype those groups positively and negatively, respectively. Alyssa notes that “While it’s one thing to show people a lot of images as part of a study, pop culture’s probably the quickest way to flood the average American’s zone with any kind of images and to show folks images (positive or negative) of people who are different from them in a sustained way…. In any case, it’s nice to have scientific validation of the idea that pop culture can matter.”

JUST FOR FUN
Monumental discovery: Glow-in-the-dark mushrooms in Brazil
‘Shroom lovers out there no longer need a blacklight to see glowing fungi. A luminescent mushroom, actually first discovered in 1840 in the streets of Brazil by children, has been rediscovered and reclassified as Neonothopanus gardneri. It shines so brightly that one can use it to read a book in the dark. Scientists suggest that the luminescence may be due to a mix of a luciferin compound and a luciferase, an enzyme that helps the luciferin interact with water and oxygen to produce light. Some believe that the benefit of glowing is that this attracts insects to the mushrooms and spurs them to spread their spores.

This week’s news compiled and summarized by Science Progress interns Michelle Spektor and Gaurav Dhiman.

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Science Progressing: July 1

SPACE TRAVEL
SpaceX Dragon Spacecraft Returns to Florida
Update: This article has been updated to replace a previous story which erroneously attributed the launch of the Falcon 9 rocket to June 4, 2011. The rocket launch took place on June 4, 2010.
After becoming the first private company to successfully launch, fly, land and recover a spacecraft from low earth orbit last year, SpaceX will put on display the Dragon spacecraft that made the journey. Viewing is open to the public now through July 10th at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The successful launch and recovery of the Dragon capsule is the latest of SpaceX’s record of innovation that has helped it secure numerous contracts and awards from the federal government, including a $1.6 billion contract with NASA to deliver crew members to the international space station starting this year.

GENOMICS AND BIG DATA
23andMe publishes first paper on the origins of disease
23andMe, a personal genotyping service, has finally done what they had always promised to do: utilize their users’ genetic information to learn more about the genetic basis of disease. In collaboration with the Michael J. Fox Foundation, the company published their findings of a study of the genetic data of more than 3,000 Parkinson’s patients. After comparing them with genetic data from 30,000 healthy controls from the 23andMe database, they found two genetic variants in Parkinson’s patients’ DNA that the control group did not exhibit. This is a significant development amidst concerns over the how and whether to police the privatization of personal genetic information.

CLEAN ENERGY INNOVATION
First ever transatlantic flight on DARPA-funded jet biofuel
The first transatlantic flight on biofuels was carried out at the Paris Air Show two weeks ago.  The Gulfstream G450 that flew from New Jersey to France was powered by a 50/50 blend of Green Jet Fuel and petroleum-based jet fuel. Green Jet Fuel, produced by Honeywell, is derived from the camelina plant and its use in this transatlantic flight saved approximately 5.5 metric tons of carbon gas emissions. The development of the fuel in 2007 was originally funded by DARPA, and its commercial use is expected to reduce airline fuel costs and carbon footprints, as well as help the military become less dependent on imported oil.

CLEAN ENERGY INNOVATION
Inkjet printers could revolutionize solar energy
A new application of inkjet printing technology can result in a more energy-efficient production process for solar devices. Engineers at Oregon State University have used this technology to create “CIGS” solar devices and found that its employment of precise patterning reduces raw material waste by 90 percent. If implemented, this technology is expected to significantly lower the production costs of solar energy cells, bringing solar energy ever closer to grid-parity.

PUBLIC HEALTH
New cigarette labels: FDA hits Big Tobacco with a taste of its own medicine
The FDA, after 25 years, is releasing new health warning labels to be placed on all cigarette cartons and advertisements by September 2012. The new labels will feature provocative images, such as lesions and other medical deformities related to smoking, in hopes of visually deterring smokers and potential smokers. Other countries have implemented similar labels, and the U.S. has been a bit slow in doing so. The 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act gave the FDA this new power to regulate tobacco, and they hope to use this new authority to counter the billions of dollars that tobacco companies spend on advertising.

CLEAN ENERGY INNOVATION
Concepts and prototypes: Two next-gen nukes
Generation III+ nuclear plants, already used in France, Japan, and Russia, are a relatively new attempt at safely providing nuclear power through the use of passive safety measures. These reactors also use electrically powered water pumps and fans, as well as gravity, condensation, and evaporation to cool the reactor during an outage. They have been in development and production since the 1990s and are meant to wStates is supposed to complete the constork safely even with power loss. China and much of Europe already have them, and the United ruction of its first two Generation III+ nuclear plants by 2016.

STEM CELL RESEARCH
Bond Financier elected to chair Board of California’s Stem Cell Agency
The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, or CIRM, California’s stem cell agency, elected Jonathan Thomas, a bond financier and attorney, to be its next board chair in a 14-11 vote. Thomas studied biology and history in college, and also received a Ph.D. in history with a focus on medical history. As CIRM chair, he plans to rely on his financial and legal expertise to maintain the CIRM’s ability to continue providing grants and loans for stem cell research in these difficult economic times. The other candidate for the position, Frank Litvack, is a cardiologist and medical device entrepreneur.

NUCLEAR SAFETY
IAEA assesses Fukushima’s response to earthquake and tsunami
A report presented at the meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) provided an assessment of the response of Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant staff to the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan in March. The report praised the staff for their heroic actions, but criticized Tepco, the operator of the plant, and Japanese authorities for underestimating the hazards posed by the natural disasters. It also recommended the creation of a global preparedness and emergency response system for the nuclear industry.

JUST FOR FUN
The new fungus from Bikini Bottom
Human scientists have discovered and named a new fungus SpongeBob SquarePants (formal classification: Spongiforma squarepantsii). True to its name, it is a sponge-like terrestrial fungus that lives in the rainforests of Borneo. Morphologically, it can be wringed completely of the water that it stores, has surface contours similar to a brain’s, has a flamboyant appearance, and emits a rather fruity odor. It even has a relative known as Spongiforma thailandica, found in the mysterious nation of Thailand, and is bound to have more brethren.  When this specimen is threatened with drying out, it can quickly absorb minute quantities of moisture from its environment.  Unlike its cartoon counterpart, this real-world organism shows quite a bit of survivalist resourcefulness, even if it, too, cannot pass its drivers license test.

This week’s news compiled and summarized by Science Progress interns Michelle Spektor and Gaurav Dhiman.

In our newest Science Progress report, Michael J. Rugnetta and Khusboo Desai examine racial and ethnic health disparities that must be addressed in order for personalized medicine to offer the greatest benefit to all. Read the full report here or the intro and summary here.

Also, see author Michael Rugnetta’s column about genetic medicine and the Latino community here, or en español here.

Geologist Jan Zalasiewicz from the University of Leicester explains his idea that humans may have changed the planet so much since the industrial revolution we’ve started a whole new geological era.

Science writer Carl Zimmer asks this week’s Hannaford question: the question he would most like answered by science.

We also hear from the author of Mind Wars, philosopher Jonathan Moreno at the University of Pennsylvania about the ethical implications of using neuroscience in security activities and military research.

In interrogations, could the highly controversial technique of waterboarding be replaced with an injection of a neurochemical like oxytocin?

What would it mean if soldiers were to have their ability to form emotional memories blocked before going into battle to minimise the psychological after-effects of combat? How do you weigh the potential to prevent a lifetime of post-traumatic stress in former soldiers against the possibility of a generation of veterans returning home without any guilt or regrets about what they might have done?

You can read the rest and hear the podcast at the Guardian.

Primary science, technology, engineering, and math education is a critical ingredient for the long run success of our nation’s innovation economy. A new CAP report by Diana Epstein and Raegen Miller addresses the primary school STEM education crisis in America, and puts forth a strategy to solve it. Read it here.

See Science Progress coverage of how the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster should inform future risk assessment in the United States:

Climate Change Could Create New Risks to U.S. Nuclear Reactor Safety

Seismic Activity and U.S. Nuclear Facilities

Take a look at our map, based on new data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, which shows just how much worse our forecasting would be without polar-orbiting environmental satellites.

For 2010′s “Snowmageddon” storm, without the satellite data, NOAA’s forecasts would have lost as much as 50 percent of their accuracy, underforecasting snowfall in Washington, D.C. by almost foot, and rainfall in the Gulf by up to an inch.

The resulting failure to prepare for flash floods, roadside strandings, air traffic delays, and transit interruptions could halt all commerce. Even worse, failing to maintain our satellite network, according to NOAA, would reduce future flood preparedness time from days to mere hours, putting human lives at risk.

Following the devastation of last week’s 9.0 scale earthquake and tsunami, Japanese citizens face new realities and threats stemming from damage to nuclear power plant facilities. The quake damaged five nuclear reactors, three of which are facing potential meltdowns due to coolant loss. The human and environmental cost of such an event could be cataclysmic.

This catastrophe in Japan should serve as a lesson to the United States as well as Japan. The featured map illustrates just how vulnerable we could be: many of the United States’s 104 nuclear facilities are located near areas of seismic activity.

This catastrophe in Japan should serve as a lesson to the United States as well as Japan, argued Joe Romm, editor of Climate Progress, and CAPAF policy analyst Richard Caperton in this CNN article today.

The featured map illustrates just how vulnerable we could be: many of the United States’s 104 nuclear facilities are located near areas of seismic activity. We need to make sure that we are taking steps to secure our aging nuclear infrastructure against earthquakes and other environmental disasters and that the risks of potential accidents are fairly bone not just by tax payers, but by those who profit from producing nuclear power. Specifically, Romm and Caperton make four suggestions to policymakers moving forward:

• Review the ability of every reactor to deal with threats to its safety. The “Japan Syndrome” — a major disaster causing loss of coolant that threatens a meltdown — means we must make sure that reactors in coastal or seismic areas can withstand any disaster. Many disasters can imperil reactors. For example, severe floods are becoming more common. As FEMA head Craig Fugate said in December after all the record-smashing deluges around the globe, “The term ’100-year event’ really lost its meaning this year.” Every reactor that is in a 500-year flood plain should demonstrate that it can handle the challenge.
• Congress must not cut funding for NOAA’s tsunami warning service. House Republicans have proposed cutting funding to NOAA — the agency directly responsible for tsunami monitoring and warning — restricting the government’s ability to respond. America has a number of reactors that could be affected by a tsunami, such as the Diablo Canyon Power Plant in California. Many more are at risk from a major earthquake.
• The permitting process must not be further weakened. Today, new reactors must undergo a multiyear review process before they are given a “Combined Operating License”. This is already an accelerated permitting process — in which multiple reviews are conducted simultaneously. It mustn’t be sped up yet again.
• The Department of Energy must continue to run the nuclear loan guarantee program to protect taxpayers and must continue to accurately charge the nuclear industry for the risk it incurs by guaranteeing these projects. To receive a loan guarantee, a builder has to pay a fee to compensate taxpayers for taking on significant risk. If DOE collects too little money, taxpayers bear too much risk. The nuclear industry has claimed that these fees are too high, despite evidence to the contrary. Congress must not interfere with DOE’s critical role in taxpayer protection.

Update: The magnitude of the quake was recently revised upwards by the U.S. Geological Survey to a 9.0. The change has been made in the text.

Update: Since publishing this feature, another explosion at Japans Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Facility has caused further damage, resulting in the evacuation of rescue workers and increased risk of a catastrophic meltdown. The New York Times has the story.

Our “charticle” puts the current debate about science and technology budgets into historical context. A few things might surprise you. Click here to download the PDF.

President Obama this week released his budget proposal to Congress for fiscal year 2012, which begins in October of this year. The president’s budget matches his important State of the Union observation last month that “maintaining our leadership in research and technology is crucial to America’s success” with new investment targets for an array of key science and innovation programs. Republicans have mapped out a different strategy, arguing that we need to cut almost all of these science R&D programs in a bid to reduce the federal budget deficit.

The budget debate every fiscal year sparks new questions about how much support the federal government should provide for the critical research and development in science and technology. But in this year of a politically split Congress, the question of “how much” is center stage. Perhaps the better question is not “how much” but “what for?” After all, if policymakers can agree on what has to be done to ensure our future economic competitiveness, then deciding how much to spend should become an easier task.

This “charticle”—a series of charts with accompanying explanations—breaks down U.S. spending on scientific research and development to its key components. The purpose: to enable a meaningful discussion about the kind of investments we need to make as a nation to remain globally competitive in the 21st century.

Download the charticle (pdf)

President Obama requested that the commission study synthetic biology following a major breakthrough in the field announced in May 2010 by researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute. The Venter Institute copied and modified an entire genome of a small bacterial cell, inserted it into a living cell of another species, and by doing so created a new, synthetic organism.

Synthetic biology offers opportunities to apply biological and engineering principles to benefit humankind in unprecedented ways. Clean energy sources, customized vaccines and targeted medicines, environmental cleansers, and hardy crops are some of the potential applications of this burgeoning field of science.

Please join us on February 3, 2011 at the Center for American Progress for a discussion about the synthetic biology report with Bioethics Commission members Nelson Michael, MD, Ph.D., and Daniel Sulmasy, MD, Ph.D., moderated by Science Progress Editor-In-Chief Jonathan Moreno.

You can RSVP and view the full event details here.

Next, Jonathan D. Moreno examines the President’s Council for the Study of Bioethical Issues’s long awaited report laying a middle path between innovation and risk management for synthetic biology research. Gavin Baker assesses the long-awaited guidance from OSTP on implementing the President’s memo on scientific integrity. As well, Dr. Peter Hotez brings us a troubling look at the surprising prevalence of preventable tropical diseases among poor and minority communities in the United States and what science can do about it.

Finally, please keep your eyes peeled for veteran SP contributor Jonathan Sallet’s five big-agenda items the Obama administration and Congress should take on to help spur innovation-led economic growth and competitiveness.

Please note that Science Progress is on hiatus for the holidays and will be back in early January.

As well, Joe Romm lists the ten most significant developments in climate science in 2010, and documents the media’s ongoing failure to properly report them. We also interviewed Dr. John Abraham who, together with 40 colleagues, has created a climate science rapid response team to set the media straight. Finally, Art Caplan points out an interesting development in Arizona where the Republican-controlled state legislature, in order to cut costs, reneged on promises to about 100 patients who had been promised life-saving organ transplants. It sounds kind of like a death panel, although it has nothing to do with the federal health reform bill.

As well, Paul B. Thompson brings the debate over genetically engineered food into the 21st century with his review of this year’s National Research Council report findings. Finally, we dissected the Department of Energy’s recent announcement of the winner of the Energy Efficient Building Systems Regional Innovation Cluster (E-RIC) grant competition, a first-of-its-kind inter-agency collaboration designed to catalyze the bottom-up formation of regional public-private partnerships for technology innovation.

Tune in next week for some original analysis of how new language in the house version of the America COMPETES Act re-authorization bill could help the National Science Foundation maximize the broader societal benefit of the research it funds.

Science Progress Editor-In- Chief Jonathan Moreno has documented both small steps forward and potentially devastating setbacks in stem cell research, as Monday’s misguided injunction on NIH funding for research using existing embryonic stem cell lines followed just weeks after the FDA approved the first ever human clinical trial for a stem cell therapy. We’ve also spent some time this summer digging into fisheries, oceans, and climate science policy with a book review and podcast with the author of Four Fish, a guest post by the authors of Merchants of Doubt, and a piece by Brad Johnson on the need for a unified federal science response in the wake of the BP oil disaster. On the innovation front we had venture capitalists Thomas Gephart and Dan Loague explain the importance of equity financing to start-ups as they take their prototypes into full-fledged commercialization, and what the government can do to help. As well, Krisztina “Z” Holly talked about how to unlock innovation by harnessing the cutting-edge research taking place in our university system.

Please note that the “blog” portion of the site will remain on hiatus for the rest of August and possibly through September. But we will continue to bring you a handful of feature articles each week, as well as twitter and RSS feeds and an email newsletter (for those who subscribe).

We hope you enjoy the new and streamlined Science Progress.

–Sean Pool