Search

The United States has completed a two-decade-long undersea mapping effort that has resulted in the discovery of 1 million square kilometers of sea floor, which is twice the size of California. This mapping effort has allowed the U.S. to claim valuable geological and biological resources, particularly in the Arctic, and has also provided a wealth of seafloor data that is fueling scientific advances. The impetus for this mapping effort came from the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which allows coastal nations to claim sea floor outside of their exclusive economic zone if they can demonstrate that it is a natural prolongation of their continental shelf. The U.S. claims are fairly conservative and are not likely to draw fierce objections, but the Senate has not ratified the Law of the Sea, so the U.S. has not submitted its maps to the U.N. commission for evaluation. The data from this mapping effort has been used for various research purposes, including identifying deep-sea habitats, studying the geologic evolution of ocean basins, and identifying areas at risk of producing submarine mudslides. [Extracted from the article]

"It's a truly extraordinary site", says archaeologist Traci Ardren of the University of Miami (UM), who is not part of the dig. "Miami has a troubling history of allowing developers to pave over its indigenous history", says archaeologist Sara Ayers-Rigsby of the Florida Public Archaeology Network. B MIAMI - b For nearly 2 years, bustling teams of archaeologists - totaling more than 120 researchers on some days - have excavated a sprawling waterfront lot here in one of this seaside city's toniest neighborhoods. [Extracted from the article]

In Virginia, for example, "the number of birds being brought to rehab centers is starting to decline", Kirchgessner says, and Toussaint's clinic recently had multiple days with no admissions of symptomatic birds. PHOTO (COLOR): A mysterious disease might have killed this American robin found in Kentucky. Toussaint and her staff soon reached a gloomy diagnosis: the jays were the latest victims of a mysterious deadly disease that had emerged in their area just a few weeks earlier and had already killed countless wild birds. [Extracted from the article]

"The NSF is Bill Nye, the Science Guy, and DARPA is a real-life I Mission Impossible i ", Sasse asserted in explaining his amendment, which would double DARPA's annual budget. PHOTO (COLOR): Efforts to develop cleaner energy technologies, such as better wind turbines and more efficient trucks, would get major funding increases under a budget proposal. Biden also wants to create three agencies modeled on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a Pentagon office created during the Cold War to help the country keep up with the Soviet Union and known for its agility in funding risky but potentially high-payoff research. [Extracted from the article]

Now, researchers have used supercomputers to simulate 125 billion possible travel routes and reconstruct the most likely "superhighways" these ancient immigrants used as they spread across the continent. Bocinsky hopes other researchers will use the technique to map early migration routes across other continents, including North America. PHOTO (COLOR): Uluru, also known as Ayers Rock, is just one example of a prominent landmark that the earliest people in Australia could have used as a navigational aid. [Extracted from the article]

How one scientist confronts the emotional toll of climate change Janet Nichols "I was trained to be calm, rational, and objective, to focus on the facts", sustainability scientist Kimberly Nicholas recalls in her new book, Under the Sky We Make: How to Be Human in a Warming World. PHOTO (COLOR): Sustainability scientist Kimberly Nicholas says confronting climate change requires acknowledging values and feelings as well as advancing science and policy. [Extracted from the article]

Michelle Bebber/Kent State University Experimental Archaeology Lab About 8500 years ago, hunter-gatherers living beside Eagle Lake in Wisconsin hammered out a conical, 10-centimeter-long projectile point made of pure copper. Copper awls, however, bucked this trend: They required relatively little ore to make, Bebber notes, and the people of the Great Lakes continued to use them for thousands of years. PHOTO (COLOR): Archaeologist Michelle Bebber of Kent State University, Kent, made these replicas of copper arrowheads and knives crafted by people of North America's Old Copper Culture. [Extracted from the article]

The bill is designed primarily to address the economic damage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and accelerate the distribution of vaccines and treatments that have proved effective against the pandemic coronavirus. PHOTO (COLOR): iStock.com/uschools A massive $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill now on its way to President Joe Biden's desk will deliver cash to a wide array of groups - including the scientific community. [Extracted from the article]

Death of EPA's controversial "censored science" rule delights researchers PHOTO (COLOR): A federal judge rejected arguments made by Andrew Wheeler, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, that a new rule limiting the agency's use of scientific evidence was just a "housekeeping" measure. On Monday, 1 day after the Biden administration signaled it was siding with the environmental groups, Morris went further, ruling that EPA had no legal authority to issue the policy. [Extracted from the article]

Similarly, Biden's memo appears to be an indirect rebuke of the Trump administration, which was widely criticized for attempting to silence federal researchers and suppress data that conflicted with its policy agenda. The Biden order "means agencies can restore committees that were arbitrarily disbanded ... & work to undo damaging process changes enacted at agencies like the EPA", tweeted Genna Reed, an analyst at UCS. [Extracted from the article]

PHOTO (COLOR): Daniel Greenberg during an appearance on C-SPAN in 2002 C-SPAN Daniel Greenberg, a journalist who pioneered coverage of the intersection of science and politics and was an influential early leader of Science's News section, died on 9 March at his home in Washington, D.C., at the age of 88. Yesterday's obituary of Greenberg in The New York Times closes with an anecdote that captures the respect that many Washington, D.C., insiders had for the journalist. [Extracted from the article]

PHOTO (COLOR): Shawn Clover/Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0) B *Update, 20 March, 12:45 p.m.: b Last night, the White House Office of Management and Budget issued a new directive that gives universities the flexibility they are seeking to deal with disruptions to research caused by the coronavirus pandemic. On Wednesday, they asked officials to expand a 9 March OMB directive giving agencies greater flexibility in monitoring awards relating to COVID-19 so that it applies to the entire federal research enterprise, not just pandemic-related activities. [Extracted from the article]

When Craig Dalton heard that his name came up at a nationally televised White House press briefing Monday, the medical epidemiologist at the University of Newcastle in Australia says, "I didn't believe it". "All of this information", Birx said, "came from a paper that Dr. Fauci provided from the Australians - first author Dalton. [Extracted from the article]

PHOTO (COLOR): A U.S. House of Representatives staffer handles copies of President Donald Trump's fiscal 2021 budget request to Congress. In recent years, lawmakers have largely rejected the Trump administration's proposed cuts and instead increased major science agency budgets, or at least held them flat. [Extracted from the article]

More than 125 scientific societies and journal publishers, as well as an influential U.S. senator, are urgently warning the Trump administration not to move forward with a rumored executive order that would make all papers produced by federally funded research immediately free to the public. The rumored policy shift comes as a coalition led by European funders continues work to implement by 2021 a policy - known as Plan S - that would require immediate open access to journal articles from research they finance. [Extracted from the article]

Democrats in the House of Representatives struck a deal with Senate Republicans and the White House in July for $320 billion more in overall spending for 2020 and 2021 than would have occurred under a 2011 budget agreement aimed at reducing the federal deficit. The deal was sealed when Democrats agreed to more money this year for the military - $738 billion - and Trump acceded to higher spending on domestic programs, totaling $632 billion. In return for higher defense spending, for example, Democrats won support for slashing Trump's $8.6 billion request for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border to $1.4 billion, along with a 3.1% civilian pay raise. [Extracted from the article]

The other group, a round table run by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), will bring together officials from academia, government, and industry to advise the government on ways to achieve national security without undermining valuable international collaborations. The NDAA provisions come in response to rising concern across the U.S. government that foreign entities, especially the Chinese government and affiliated institutions, have been systematically targeting the acquisition of intellectual property generated by U.S.-funded research. In general, university and science groups supported the House language, which called for the creation of the White House task force and the NASEM round table. [Extracted from the article]

Major journal editors blast EPA's "secret science" rule, again PHOTO (COLOR): Andrew Wheeler, acting administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Cliff Owen/AP photo The editors of six major scientific journals have raised a new alarm about the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) controversial data transparency proposal. [Extracted from the article]

EPA's "secret science" plan is back, and critics say it's worse Critics are blasting a revised Trump administration plan to give the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) broad power to ignore research results when setting public health rules if officials decide the underlying data are not adequately accessible to the public. EPA officials have argued that the data transparency policy is needed to ensure that the agency uses only the best "pivotal regulatory science" that can be "independently validated" when crafting "significant" rules that are expected to impose major economic costs. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses debate in the U.S. congress over the use of science. Topics discussed include controversy over bills that would require the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to make the data about its science advisers publicly available, plans of the U.S. president Donald Trump, for regulations and comments from Paul Billings of the American Lung Association's Washington, on concerns over laws.

The article focuses on environmental regulations being introduced by U.S. President Donald J. Trump's administration for reducing funding for environmental science, as of March 2017. It states that the administration has been considering substantial spending cuts at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and mentions that the initiative proposal for the reduction include science arm of EPA, and research office of NOAA.

PHOTO (COLOR): Windows at the University of Florida's Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience in St. Augustine have been covered with plywood in preparation for Hurricane Dorian. Hurricane researchers say that "if Dorian makes landfall in Florida, it would be the fourth hurricane to do so since 2016, following Hermine (2016), Irma (2017) and Michael (2018)", The Washington Post reports. And "Assuming #HurricaneDorian makes landfall in Florida, this will be the 4th consecutive year with a Florida #hurricane landfall - the most consecutive years with a Florida landfall since they were hit by hurricanes in a whopping 7 consecutive years from 1944-1950", tweeted Philip Klotzbach, a hurricane researcher affiliated with Colorado State University in Fort Collins. [Extracted from the article]

Highlights from the article: On a largely party line vote, lawmakers voted 225 to 193 in favor of an amendment to a 2020 spending bill that would bar the Trump administration from convening ethics advisory boards to review grant applications at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for studies that use fetal tissue. Today's amendment, to a spending bill that covers HHS and NIH for the 2020 fiscal year that begins on 1 October, would bar HHS from expending money to convene the panels.

Highlights from the article: A physicist who spent 2 decades at the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico today pleaded not guilty to federal charges of lying about his involvement in a research funding program run by the Chinese government. Prosecutors allege that Turab Lookman, who worked at LANL from 1999 until recently, repeatedly denied involvement with China's Thousand Talents Program, despite having agreed to join it "for personal compensation". Lookman, who has a doctorate in theoretical physics and was awarded a prestigious LANL fellowship in 2017, presented his plea to a federal magistrate judge in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Highlights from the article: Emory University has ousted two veteran biomedical researchers and shuttered their laboratory after the National Institutes of Health (NIH) expressed concern about their foreign ties. It is not clear when the two researchers left Emory or shut down their laboratory, which had sizeable funding from NIH.

Highlights from the article: PHOTO (COLOR): Representative Tim Ryan (R-OH) leads a spending panel that wants to revive the congressional Office of Technology Assessment. Restoring OTA, Ryan said in a statement, "will help Congress understand technology developments and pave the way for better technology and science policy".