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Investigates the claim of scientists regarding the evidence for nuclear fusion in a breaker of organic solvent at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Consequences of the claim for nuclear proliferation and energy production; Contradiction of other scientists on the claim; Comparison between nuclear fission and fusion.

The article reports on a proposed bill that would require federally funded scientists to make their accepted papers freely available online for public within 6 months of publication. The bill, introduced last week by senators John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas and Joseph Lieberman, a Democrat from Connecticut, would make mandatory a voluntary National Institutes of Health (NIH) policy and extend it to every major federal research agency, from the National Science Foundation to the Department of Defense. The House and Senate appropriations committees had asked NIH to develop such a policy after patient groups insisted they should have free access to biomedical studies. The request has been ignored by most NIH grantees. Meanwhile, an NIH advisory committee has recommended that the policy be mandatory and that the 12-month limit be reduced to 6 months for most journals. The Cornyn-Lieberman bill would require NIH to incorporate those changes. But the bill also would mandate a similar plan at any U.S. agency funding at least $100 million a year in extramural research. The manuscripts could be posted in existing archives, such as a university server or arXiv, the physics preprint server.

The article informs that lawmakers in the U.S. are expected this year to consider whether the National Institutes of Health (NIH) should require researchers to send their accepted manuscripts to a free full-text archive. The voluntary policy, in effect since May, is meant to make freely available the results of NIH-funded studies and guide the NIH management. An NIH advisory panel recently recommended that the NIH make submission mandatory and post papers 6 months after publication in journals. The current guideline is 12 months.

The article presents information on several developments related to scientists working in the U.S. The 2007 Abel Prize for mathematics has been awarded to Srinivasa Varadhan, a probability theory researcher at the New York University in New York City. Neurobiologist Carla Shatz will retire as chairperson of the neurobiology department at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to lead the Bio-X program at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Plagiarism has been alleged against Indian researcher, Hema Rangaswami, working at the University of California in San Diego, California, regarding a 2005 paper about pathways involved in the development of skin cancer that was published in the periodical, "Journal of Biological Chemistry."

The article reports that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) is weighing on an online pilot project to solicit public input on patent applications. According to the officers, tapping into the expertise of outside scientists, lawyers, and laypeople would improve the quality of patents. The peer initiative focuses on the scientific papers and previous patents that could render claims invalid. Although applicants often flood the PTO with supporting material, 4500 examiners of the PTO are prohibited from consulting with outsiders about its relevance. IBM Corp. is a firm supporter of the pilot system, and officials of the PTO hint that software and microchip patents will be one area of focus. Some observers worry that the system will simply add to an already heavy workload for examiners. Others speculate that a competitor, assuming that an applicant would be awarded a patent, might try to game the system by not introducing some prior art until it could be used for maximum leverage as part of a later challenge to the patent.

The article reports on the new rules of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which restrict their scientists from speaking to reporters or presenting papers at meetings without departmental review and approval. These two agencies are among the most popular and scientifically sophisticated agencies in the U.S. government. The scientists at the NOAA have been ordered to refrain from speaking at public without official consent to avoid any controversy related to scientific research. A front-page story by Andy Revkin in the January 28, 2006 issue of the New York Times shows more grim picture at the NASA. The NASA has put a gag on James Hansen, director of the NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, because he pointed out in a meeting that climate change signal is now so strong that the voluntary measures proposed by the U.S. administration are likely to be inadequate.

This article reports that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Research Integrity in September found physician Xiaowu Li guilty of scientific misconduct for passing off images of mouse melanoma cells as human pancreatic cancer cells in a paper published online March 2004 in the journal "Carcinogenesis." Li was working under cancer researcher Daniel Ramos at the University of California, San Francisco. Ramos says that he was unaware of the publication, which Li wrote with a group of researchers in China, and was initially upset that he hadn't been asked to be a co-author. But once he recognized the false images, which were taken from his own lab, he contacted university officials. Ramos says the results of other experiments he performed with Li appear to be valid. Li told him during the investigation that the pressure to compile an impressive research record drove him to commit misconduct.

The article reports that U.S. share of scientific publications has steadily decreased as Asian contributions have steadily risen over the past 15 years. U.S. scientists still lead by a wide margin in the impact of their papers, as measured by citation analysis.

Textbooks usually summarize the work of famous chemists such as Marie Curie and Antoine Lavoisier in a few lines or paragraphs. Students who want to read the scientists' writings or follow their arguments can browse this archive of classic chemistry papers, book excerpts, and other resources. The site, hosted by Lemoyne College in Syracuse, New York, holds or links to selections from more than 50 chemical thinkers, ranging from the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius to Nobel laureate Linus Pauling. The archive shows the researchers struggling toward the right answer— and occasionally stumbling.